After announcement of special package by Government of India, Textile industry looks at appointment of high profile Smriti Irani as Textile Minister with high hopes.
Industry sources are looking forward to Irani to driving growth and achieving the export target of $300 billion by 2024-25.
According to a study conducted by the Crisil Research, the textile sector MSMEs will create new employments to every new 10 lakh output, which is the second largest after furniture industry.
Prabhu Damodharan, Secretary General, Indian Texpreneurs Federation (ITF) said “For the last two years, textile ministry has created a good platform for growth by improving the efficiency in the system and has also designed few good policies to trigger growth in this sector. Now, Irani can drive the textile sector towards $300 billion exports targeted by 2024-25.”
“We have to plan segment-wise exports and fix targets for each category (of item)”, he continued.
“For example – India’s export of yarn to Bangladesh is huge, more than 60 per cent, but fabric export is a meager 12 per cent. Bangladesh is reducing the import of yarn year-on-year and increasing the import of fabric. The Indian industry is geared to export fabrics. The Ministry and the industry should work in tandem to capture this huge market,” the secretary said.
“An immediate PTA with UK will help to strengthen our position and apart from the traditional markets, tremendous effort is required to tap new markets like Russia. Russia imports Rs. 65000 crore worth of textiles, out of which India’s share is just Rs. 500 crore”, he said.
ITF has appealed to the Ministry for appointment of an officer of Joint Secretary Rank only to monitor export growth and advise suitably.
Reverting to cotton, the Federation perceives that the Government should use a mechanism to analyses and assess the cotton crop and stock data every month.
With fashion moving to cotton-manmade fiber blends, duty rationalization of MMF would trigger growth, the ITF Secretary said, inviting the new minister to visit the textile manufacturing clusters across the country to understand the strengths of each of these.
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