After the special package for the textile industry, industry stakeholders are now awed by the appointment of a new minister Smriti Irani at the helm. Industry sources are looking forward to Irani to driving growth and achieving the export target of $300 billion by 2024-25.

Reiterating the need for industry-ministry collaboration to achieve the targeted export growth, the Secretary of Indian Texpreneurs’ Federation (ITF) Prabhu Damodharan said “we have to plan segment-wise exports and fix targets for each category (of item).”

“For example – India’s export of yarn to Bangladesh is huge, more than 60 per cent, but fabric export is a meagre 12 per cent. Bangladesh is reducing the import of yarn year-on-year and increasing the import of fabric. The Indian industry is geared to export fabrics. The ministry and the industry should work in tandem to capture this huge market,” he said.

To capitalise on the market opportunity, an FTA with the UK would help strengthen our position. We should also tap new markets such as Russia, as it imports textiles worth Rs 65,000 cr annually. India’s share in this pie is just around Rs 500 cr, Prabhu observed.

ITF has appealed to the Ministry for appointment of an officer of Joint Secretary rank only to monitor export growth and advise suitably.

Reverting to cotton, the Federation perceives that the Government should use a mechanism to analyse and assess the cotton crop and stock data every month.

With fashion moving to cotton-manmade fibre blends, duty rationalisation of MMF would trigger growth, the ITF Secretary said, inviting the new minister to visit the textile manufacturing clusters across the country to understand the strengths of each of these.

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