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Textile industry’s problems will be addressed, says Manmohan

— PHOTO: V. V. KRISHNAN

SMOOTH WELCOME: Union Minister for Textiles Shanker Sinh Waghela (left), greets Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with a special ‘cocoon’ garland during the valedictory session of Tex Summit 2007 in New Delhi on Saturday.

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, on Saturday said that he would ask the Ministries of Finance, Commerce and Textiles and the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council to discuss with the textile industry to sort out the various problems faced by it.

Referring to the dip in textile exports since the second half of 2006-07 financial year, he assured that the Government would do everything to help the industry. “The appreciation of the rupee may be a contributory factor and certainly puts our major competitors in an advantageous position. … We [The Government] are alive to the evolving situation and will take all possible measures to ensure that the real, productive portion of our economy is not hurt by the appreciation”.

He also announced that the Government proposed to set up a technology mission on technical textiles to direct the growth of the emerging area in a time-bound manner and reiterated that it would continue with the Integrated Textiles Parks Scheme and the Technology Upgradation Fund Scheme for the textile industry in future.

Delivering the valedictory address of a two-day meet organised by the Textiles Ministry for a brainstorming among captains of the industry, policy-makers and other stakeholders on the road forward, he said there was a need to recognise that rupee appreciation was only a transient issue and that there were several other long-term problems that were preventing the industry from growing to the desired levels.

The industry, he said, must adjust itself to the new dynamics, invest in operations that have the scale and scope to generate efficiencies and engage in ‘ruthless’ cost-cutting so that it became more competitive. It must graduate from being a low-cost, low-value supplier to a high-volume high-value supplier, invest for the coming two decades instead of just the next season, develop internationally known brands and labels and have a global footprint and global ambitions. “You must show aggression and enterprise like your counterparts in other sectors such as automobiles, steel and pharmaceuticals. … We can’t have a ‘chalta hai’ [a casual] attitude”.

He also asked the Textiles Ministry to expedite its proposals to create investment regions for the textile sector, and launch a scheme to train one million persons in five years on specific textile-related trades and a programme to revitalise handloom cooperatives on the pattern of agricultural cooperatives.

Setting up of investment regions in a public-private-partnership (PPP) mode with high quality infrastructure and covering the entire value chain could help obviate the burdens imposed by multiple levies, high power costs, bottlenecks in shipments and delays in legal clearance. They could become textile hubs with billions of dollars of both domestic and foreign investments, he said.

The Ministry and the various export promotion councils under it, he said, also had an obligation to facilitate market access and greater value realisation for the products of the industry. The Ministry needed to work out PPP models to enable private industry to engage itself in making handloom products from being low-value to high-value, he added.

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