The Indian Ministry of Textiles (MoT) is aggressively working towards long-pending National Textile Policy as various meetings are being held in this regard across the nation.
As per top officials of the MoT, the Government would address all the structural issues in its new National Textile Policy, which is expected to be announced in couple of months.
So, what’s on the cards! Availability of basic raw materials at international price, encouraging scale of operations by developing 10 mega textile parks with over 1,000 acres of land closer to the ports, giving plug and play facilities including the necessary safeguard measures in the labour laws.
The Government would also announce a scheme to set up dedicated textile parks for technical textiles, textile machinery manufacturing with the state-of-the-art technology spares, accessories, parts to promote import substitution thereby reducing the capital cost substantially as India is currently depending on imported technology barring spinning sector.
The Government is also exploring possibilities of setting up R&D centres with state-of-the-art facilities for each segment of the textile industry.
Critical issues like power cost, credit cost and its availability are also expected to be addressed in the policy.
Recently, Union Textile Minister Smriti Irani held a meeting with various stakeholders in Delhi.
Ravi Capoor, Secretary and Nihar Ranjan Dash, Joint Secretary, MoT also held a meeting in Coimbatore with the office-bearers of 48 textile associations like AEPC, TEXPROCIL, PDEXCIL, SRTEPC, AMFII etc., representing the entire textile value chain.
Around 200 industrialists representing the entire textile value chain from South India and also the members of the National Committee for Textiles & Clothing (NCTC) attended the meeting.
Apart from sharing details about the National Textile Policy and having industry input on the same, the Secretary advised the textile industry especially in Tamil Nadu to grab the opportunities by diversifying into polyester segment to boost exports.
T. Rajkumar, Chairman, Confederation of Indian Textile Industry (CITI),who organised this meeting, is very hopeful with regard to Government initiatives. “India has been suffering with surplus production capacities across the value chain that were created during the last 4 years with huge investments that could be utilised for polyester textile manufacturers.”
It is pertinent to mention here that the Indian textile and clothing industry has been facing severe challenges in the aftermath of demonetisation, GST implementation, economic slowdown across the globe, US-China trade war and the recent outbreak of Coronavirus in China.
Though there is a steady growth in the domestic market, the exports got stagnated; rather there is a 4 per cent negative growth during the last 4 years. China has started cutting down its production, outsourcing and created huge space in the international market. This opportunity has been fully exploited by small countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, among others, and pushed back India from 2nd to 5th position in the global textile trade.
