The Hindu Business Line : Minister assures more funds for textile research

Coimbatore April 7 The Union Minister of State for Textiles, Mr E.V.K.S Elangovan, has assured the textile industry that his Government will seriously consider supporting the textile research associations in the country by infusing additional funds required by them to strengthen their research activities.

The Union Minister, participating in the inauguration of the annual joint technological conference at the South India Textile Research Association (SITRA) here on Saturday, was responding to a plea made in this regard by the chairman of the Southern India Mills Association (SIMA), Mr S.V. Arumugham.

Value creation

The SIMA chief, participating in the function, earlier pointed out that the domestic textile sector, poised to handle huge investments on the scale of Rs 200,000 crore by 2012, would require adequate backing from the textile research associations (TRAs). The TRAs are to support the Indian textile industry by rendering competitive technology in product designing so as to enable the latter to compete in the international market. Most of them, however, are made to operate with low budgets and the annual fund allocation of Rs 10 crore or so currently allowed by the Centre would not be sufficient for these bodies in creating value in their services to the industry, he added.

Mr Elangovan told the conference that while the Centre supported the generic research programmes of TRAs, it encouraged public-private partnership mode in R&D projects so that the industry collaborated with the TRAs for their day-to-day technological needs. He also urged the textile enterprises to set aside a percentage of their profit for R&D.

Mr Elangovan, who sought the textile research bodies' support for promoting technical textiles, said India as a large textile production base and having vast technical manpower had the potential to emerge exporter of technical textiles whose share in the total textile manufacturing activities in developed countries currently worked out to 40 per cent or more.

Mr Arumugham highlighted the hiccups created by a budgetary amendment that withdrew the central excise duty exemption hitherto available to a list of 40 textile machineries, thereby imposing 8 per cent excise on them which, according to him, has now led to the textile industry paying 8 per cent countervailing duty on the imported machinery.

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