Coimbatore: While the growth of technical textiles sector is spoken of enthusiastically and has been projected at 2lakh crore by 2021, there needs to be a reality check about its growth, said Raghvendra Singh, secretary textiles, ministry of textiles.

The industry and research institutes should come together to realize the sector’s full potential, he said and asked industrialists to identify prototypes developed by centres of excellence in textiles and adapt them to the industry. He was speaking at the inaugural session of the ‘National Investors Conclave on Technical Textiles’ in the city on Wednesday.

Singh said while the Centre has classified 207 products as technical textiles for import and export, it was ready to expand the list based on representations from stakeholders. If industrialists give a list of technical textile products according to their importance of the export or import potential, the Directorate General of Foreign Trade under the ministry of commerce and industry will come out with notifications expanding the list, he said. “It depends on us how to make it pervasive.”

Over the past seven to eight months, Singh said they had consulted various ministries in the Union government and state governments and have come up with 106 textile products, for which standards already existed. “These belong to various sectors such as railways, home affairs, defence, shipping, agriculture and transport. We need to work on these with the BIS, as we have the standards and have a procedure which could be made mandatory with these ministries for their tenderization process,” he said. As there was a month’s time before the new government assumes office, Singh said stakeholders of the sector should do the groundwork and come up with what needs to be represented to each ministry.

The centres of excellences in textile sector across the country, such as the South India Textile Research Association (SITRA) in Coimbatore, have come up with around 600 prototypes, Singh said. He added that it was incumbent on industry associations to assess the prototypes and in order of priority select around 50 or 60 and give it an industry connect.

Speaking at the session, K S Sundararaman, chairman of Indian Technical Textile Association, said currently only the established players in the field were seeking to expand and there was a need to ‘evangelize’ more new entrepreneurs to take up technical textiles. Technical textiles would create jobs and bring more women into the workforce, said Prabhu Damodaran, convener of Indian Texpreneurs Federation.

Published On : 25-04-2019

Source : Times of India