New Delhi, June 25 (KNN) To help Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of making India a $5 Trillion economy by 2024, the Indian Texpreneurs Federation (ITF) submitted 11- point appeal and suggestions to Smriti Irani, the Minister of Textiles informing her about the urgent need to improve the competitiveness of the textile sector.

The suggestions were based on an online survey carried out by ITF, in which 320 out of 563 ITF member Textile entrepreneurs participated. The letter was also marked to the Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal.

"The textiles manufacturers’ market focus is with only 3 to 4 countries or Zones, where they are not able to compete in prices with FTA countries like Bangladesh. The textile industry is not catching up in terms of manufacturing efficiency and in parallel, they are also facing worker shortage moreover, with the rise in manufacturing cost they are able to compete with the low-cost destinations in low-value products," the ITF letter to Smriti Irani said.

In the survey, few entrepreneurs mentioned that a higher cost of capital is making them less competitive.

Based on the findings of the survey, ITF has urged the Union government, firstly, to consider forming a task force with industry stakeholders particularly with the representation of strong regional manufacturing associations in order to identify the short term and long-term solutions to trigger the growth of exports.

These industries also raised an issue regarding not being able to compete with Vietnam and China because of the expensive rates of the MMF raw materials.

Government support in terms of subsidy is not enough and lack of rationalization of duty structure in GST with respect to processing sector id making them inefficient.

Under the appeal and suggestions mentioned in the letter, which was given to Smriti Irani, it was suggested that “In the case of Tamil Nadu, there are certain unique exporting mega clusters like Coimbatore, Tirupur, Karur and Erode.

One Joint Secretary cadre officer from the Union textiles ministry should visit periodically and form a separate task force in this region to facilitate the growth opportunities and support the industry to resolve the challenges, suggested ITF.

Moreover, it was further suggested to imitate the concept of green process and green factories across India. As Branding the sustainability factor to the Indian Textile Industry and to use the growing importance of sustainable textiles in the world markets.

As marked in the letter, “a special scheme should be announced by the government to promote large scale apparel manufacturing and announce Cotton Technology Mission to achieve 1000kgs per hectare in the next few years as most of the cotton growing industries have crossed 1000 kgs per hectare.

This will help the Indian textile industry with abundant raw material and help farmers to double their income. Along with this, it will also help in cutting down the volatility of cotton prices that we are currently facing.

They also want to speed up India Eurasia FTA and other FTs and have a better engagement with the US by using the IS-China Trade war in which India will be able to gain better market share in textile and apparels. Resolving the issues of GST (inverted duty structure) issue with the processing sector is another one of their suggestions.

The Textile Industry believes that until these challenges are resolved Government should support the sector by way of export incentives to sustain the current volume of business.

Published On : 25-06-2019

Source : Sme Times