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Helping Tirupur do more

Few consumers around the world may be aware that workers producing fashionable high street clothes in the garment centre of Tirupur in Tamil Nadu live in unhealthy and deprived conditions. The workforce of this town with ramshackle infrastructure, broken roads, a 50 per cent deficit in good housing for nearly two lakh workers, open drains, and a deficient water supply and sanitation system amazingly overcomes such squalor to power an export juggernaut. By the reckoning of the exporters' association of Tirupur, which is essentially spread across 28 square kilometres, the value of its knitwear exports is poised to touch Rs.10,000 crore next year. There is scope to achieve higher growth if the shortfall of skilled labour can be met. It is reasonable to ask whether the Central and State governments have done enough to help. Have they worked to improve roads, housing, water supply, sanitation, and health care with any sense of urgency? A recent assessment by the local municipality clearly points to an inadequacy of effort to improve living conditions. On a wider scale, Tirupur is also beset with problems of industrial pollution, such as disposal of effluents and sludge from dyeing units, but the textile industry is working to mitigate these with judicially supervised control measures.

The Achilles' heel of this `dollar town' is apparently the serious shortage of quality housing. This is unsurprising given the low priority accorded to expansion of affordable shelter in official policy. The undersupply is evident from the municipality's figures that show a third of the population as living in slums. Many of the tile-roofed shanties that they occupy are located along heavily polluted waterways and have no proper sanitation; open drains run along narrow streets; solid waste disposal remains a major unresolved issue. This is not a productivity-enhancing milieu for hosiery workers, who constitute about 60 per cent of slum residents. Only a policy that aims to create the right conditions to sustain growth in the garment industry can bring about accelerated development of Tirupur. A water and sanitation scheme in the public-private partnership mode was taken up under the Tirupur Area Development Programme and it has become operational in recent months, a decade after the first moves to augment infrastructure. Yet, it may not meet the needs of all residents, particularly the poor who cannot afford even rental housing. A more pragmatic approach would be to build fully serviced ownership houses and affordable rental accommodation. In the area of healthcare, a proposal to build a 100-bed multi-speciality hospital for worker-members of the Employees' State Insurance Corporation is still on paper because of the non-availability of land. This is a disservice to the 80,000-plus workers who pay the premium for ESI healthcare access. Surely, the Government can and must do more for Tirupur. Its experience of unplanned expansion holds valuable lessons for towns going in for rapid industrialisation.

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