From Cuba to Kerala !
Pablo, who is a member of the Communist Party of Cuba, requested the FCRI authorities here that he be allowed to visit one of the Communist Party offices in Kerala where the first democratically-elected Communist Chief Minister in the world assumed power way back in 1957.
The FCRI authorities made arrangements for Pablo’s visit to the CPI office in the town. And Pablo was quite at home meeting and chatting with Vijayan Kunissery, the district secretary of the CPI, who had visited Cuba in 2002.
He went to Cuba at the invitation of the trade unions of Cuba, representing AITUC, the trade union arm of the CPI, to attend the 50th anniversary of the Revolutionary Government of Cuba.
“Pablo Fernandez Garcia had difficulty in pronouncing some words in English, yet he managed to convey his feelings and views. Pablo was pleasantly surprised to see the portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin adorning the walls of a political party office here. He queried whether a photograph of Fidel Castro has been kept at the office. He pointed out that India and Cuba had a long-standing friendship as members of the Non-Aligned Movement; that Cuban president Fidel Castro enjoyed a personal rapport with leaders like Indira Gandhi,” said Vijayan about their talk.
Pablo informed Vijayan that he would take home the greetings of the people of Kerala to his fellow countrymen. Pablo said that he was in a hurry to return home since he wanted to partake in the 80th birthday celebrations of Castro.
Pablo Fernandez Garcia was among ten foreign nationals who attended the 45-day training programme on ‘Advanced management practices in process plant and engineering industries/service organisation’ at the FCRI in Palakkad.
The training programme for foreign nationals is held under the Indian Technical and Economic Co-operation Programme of the Ministry of External Affairs. It is undertaken by FCRI as part of extending hi-tech facilities to the personnel of developing countries.
During the course of their training programme at the FCRI here, the ten students visited various industries in Kerala, Bangalore, Coimbatore and Ootty and gathered a lot of managerial inputs and had a first-hand experience of the working environment in these places.
The ten students, who are middle management executives in public sector enterprises, were drawn from Iran, Nigeria, Cuba, Afghanistan and Kenya.
The FCRI under the Ministry of Heavy Industry and Public Enterprises is engaged in the design and development of flow products/measurement techniques and is the first of its kind in South-East Asia. It was established in 1988 as a United Nations Development Project (UNDP).
The FCRI has been in the news recently for throwing open its campus of 250 acres for setting up the proposed satellite centre of the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai.
FCRI has offered its classrooms, world class accredited calibration facility-cum-research centre and workshop to the students of IIT till they have own facility.
Once the proposal for setting up the IIT is cleared by the Ministry of Human Resources, the FCRI is certain to become a beehive of activity.
News Courtesy: newindpress.com Rate this Article:
Posted on 17 December 06 by PalakkadNews
