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The Textile Ministry is working towards reducing the industry’s dependence on imported machine tools and is reaching out to engineering organisations to step in to meet the gap in domestic machinery production and demand, Textiles Minister Smriti Irani has said.
The Minister said the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme for the textile industry was almost ready but the National Textile Policy was taking time as labour and agriculture reforms were earlier being awaited and now the policy needed to strike a balance between government’s allocation of resources and the industry’s preparedness to take that allocation and convert it into opportunity.
The challenge for the textile industry in India was that most of the required machine tools were imported, Irani said at a media event on Thursday. The Textiles Ministry, under the guidance of Principal Scientific Advisor, K Vijay Raghavan, had reached out to IITs across the country, particularly Chennai, to highlight to them what the machinery needs of the industry were. “We are hoping that we can encourage more and more engineering institutions to come forward,” she added.
Machine tool making
Another challenge facing the sector was that machine tool making did not fall within the Textile Ministry administratively, Irani said. “Irrespective of administrative mandate, we as a government will ensure that we will converge efforts to ensure that those machines are made in India,” she said.
On the PLI scheme for the textile industry, the Minister said that it was almost ready. “We have done much of our groundwork and the scheme is almost ready,” she said. The objective of the scheme is to create global champions in MMF apparel and Technical Textiles by providing incentive from 3 per cent to 15 per cent on stipulated incremental turnover for five years.
Responding to questions on why there had been a delay in the finalisation of the National Textiles Policy, the Minister said the policy could not have been conclusive when other things were developing.
She expressed satisfaction that prominent reforms in agriculture and labour had happened but added that the new policy needed to find a balance between government’s speedy allocations and the industry’s preparedness to take that allocation and convert it into opportunity.
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