A survey conducted by the leading textile body Indian Texpreneurs Federation (ITF) has said that removal of import duty on cotton as well as the need for authentic data can enable growth for the textile sector in the upcoming cotton season.
99 per cent of the entrepreneurs, associated with ITF, mentioned that cotton import duty will make Indian cotton prices artificially higher than international prices in the upcoming 2022-23 cotton year.
Notably, 81 per cent of the participants mentioned that Indian farmers are not the real beneficiaries of the import duty imposition, while all of them said that traders and MNCs are the real beneficiaries of this protection.
In a statement, Prabhu Dhamodaran, Convenor, ITF, said that the textile and apparel sector in the country is facing turbulence due to historic high cotton prices combined with demand contraction in developed markets, even as the industry is now hoping for a robust cotton crop harvest in the new season starting from October 2022.
The textile body had conducted the survey amongst its member entrepreneurs representing a major value chain of textile manufacturing to get an idea of few key friction points regarding the upcoming cotton season.
Prabhu Dhamodaran suggested the removal of import duty on cotton to ensure level playing field with competing countries, extracting sales data in number of bales with the help of the GST portal with reference to ginners across India are the need of the hour.
He also insisted on installing SIM-card-based smart meters in ginning mills to get real-time pressing data in the number of cotton bales.
