Initiatives like NTTM to give a much-needed fillip to the Technical Textiles Industry

The mission is dedicated to encourage domestic production of technical textiles in order to explore global potential and meet domestic and international market demands. 

PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry at its headquarters in New Delhi, conducted an International Conference on Technical Textile, themed: Market Growth, Opportunities, and Challenges in Technical Textiles. Several delegates, including experts, industry players, and researchers, attended the conference to deliberate on the potential and challenges pertaining to technical textiles.

Rajeev Saxena, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Textiles, Government of India & Mission Coordinator, National Technical Textile Mission, mentioned that the Technical Textiles, India’s sunrise sector, is witnessing a rapid growth. He stated that the PM’s vision of making India a developed nation by 2047 will be accelerated by the significant growth in the technical textiles sector.

He added, the government’s National Technical Textile Mission (NTTM) is based on a long term vision and is intended to make India a market leader for technical textiles, globally, along with boosting the growth of the domestic market. The mission is dedicated to encourage domestic production of technical textiles in order to explore global potential and meet domestic and international market demands. 

He further mentioned his concerns over the bottlenecks, such as IT machinery importing, shortage of skilled manpower, and weakness in the Education system, currently impeding the growth of the sector.

The penetration level, wellbeing and sustaining power of our country are the indicators for the development of the textile sector, concluded Saxena.

Madhu Sudhan Bhageria, Chair, PHDCCI Textiles Committee & CMD, Filatex India, said India has a small presence in the global textile market but has potential to become a key player in the industry. The Indian Textile market is expected to grow rapidly in the upcoming years due to a variety of factors including favourable government initiatives, increasing demand of technical textiles in various end use applications and the country’s robust manufacturing capabilities.

Prof Abhijit Majumdar, Department of Textile and Fibre Engineering, IIT Delhi, called the Indian Technical Textile sector as a knowledge and research driven sector, and emphasised on the need to bring in a UG level curriculum which is principle based while eliminating the perimeter centric learning.

He informed, only 5 per cent seats are available in government colleges and universities, which indicates that textile education does not have a business perspective for which the government has to take the onus and it is our responsibility as teachers to build a solid curriculum, good laboratories and produce good engineers as the existing curriculum is only Info based and not the knowledge based.

Nandan Kumar, Director, High Performance Textiles, emphasised on the collaborative working of all the stakeholders to promote the adoption of the new standards in the Industry, while pressing on the importance of recycling of high performance protective textiles.

He added, the new trend is to produce lighter and comfortable textiles and yet achieve the properties. Staple fibre and fibre blending has a huge potential in India whether it is weaving, spinning or dyeing finishing. Single kg of yarn can cost upto 45 dollars and we are exporting a yarn made up of tungsten due to which it costs 150 dollars a kg. Therefore, we should try to give the engineers a flavour about the new trends and educate them about the last 5 years patent.

Dr Arindam Basu, Director General Northern India Textile Research Association, said, as India is expected to invest-$1.4trn by 2025 on infrastructure across roads, rail, ports and housing, all these industries pose a huge market for the Indian Technical Textile Industry. The size of the Indian Technical Textiles industry is around $ 22.5 billion against $ 272 billion size of the Global Technical Textiles industry. While in terms of exports, Indian Industry accounts for $ 2.85 billion as compared to the $ 126 billion of Global Level.

We cannot compete with products of low cost countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh, we have to go for high value products that are not very easy to copy. Given the surge in demand and usage for these products around the world, the emphasis should be on domesticating technology and implementing quality standards in specialised items, added Dr Basu.