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Vision to boost leather exports three-fold

Staff Reporter

To create a million new jobs; scope for enhancing women employment

CHENNAI: Union Minister of State for Commerce Jairam Ramesh on Tuesday released a vision document setting out the route map for the leather industry to clock an almost three-fold increase in exports to $7 billion and create a million new jobs over the next five years.

An increase in tanning and production capacity, promoting two tanning clusters and five special economic zones (SEZ) for products, getting into the volume market of footwear and a direct shipping service from the east coast to the U.S. were some of the strategies recommended by the document.

Addressing presspersons here after releasing the document prepared by the Council for Leather Exports (CLE), the Minister said leather industry's growth was important not just for the economic benefits, but in the backdrop of its social importance. Apart from a large number of women, many of those employed by it were from weaker sections such as scheduled castes and minority communities. From that perspective and considering the potential, the Ministry and the Council wanted to attract "top brands, top companies [especially in footwear] and aggressively go after them for making investment in India."

Mr. Ramesh said there was a lot of interest among Taiwanese footwear companies in coming to India, as "they want to diversify away from China". While work on the facility of one such company supplying to Adidas was in progress at Tada in Andhra Pradesh (about 75 km from Chennai), four other big Taiwanese firms had expressed keen interest in coming to India and in particular to Tamil Nadu.

Apart from the proposed SEZ exclusively for footwear units near Sriperumbedur, five more leather industry-specific SEZs were to be established in Chennai, Kanpur, Kolkata, Agra and Tada. Krishnapatnam, near Nellore, and Kolkata, he said, would host the proposed tannery complexes. "We want to make a determined effort to increase our footwear export to the US ... to 20-25 per cent of the country's total footwear exports [from 12 per cent] in five years," Mr. Ramesh said, while emphasising the need for changing the product focus from predominantly men's shoes to footwear for women and children.

Underscoring the need to reduce export of finished leather and increase that of value-added products, he said that because of environment and other factors the industry was expected to spread to more States. The Ministry, on its part, wanted to promote the industry in Assam and Bihar, primarily in veiw of the availability of hides and skins.

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