New textile policy soon: Gangwar

Union Minister of State for Textiles Santosh Gangwar said the national textile policy will be finalized soon and it is likely to be ready by the month of April. Speaking to Indian Textile Journal, Gangwar said, ?The national textile policy will be finalised soon. May be at the end of April.?

Gangwar was speaking on the sidelines of a FICCI conference on ?Strategy for Making India a Global Leader in Textiles and Apparels?. He also stated that the new National Textile Policy is important and informed that government is willing to work hand-in-hand with the industry.

Addressing the inaugural session, the Minister stressed upon the need to create jobs and upgrade the skills of workers employed in the textiles industry. ?Unfortunately, in this country we have more engineers but there is woeful shortage of skilled people,? he added.

He said that the Ministry was ensuring that work on 20 textile parks is expedited and the technology up-gradation plan given a fillip through an investment of Rs 4,000 crore. Talking about the initiatives taken up by the Ministry, Gangwar said that he had announced the scheme for setting up of apparel and garment centres for North Eastern states that will augment the capacity in the region for unleashing entrepreneurship and creating a pool of skilled workforce for the apparel sector.

?The scheme of Integrated Textile Parks (ITP) is one of the flagship schemes by the Ministry, which was held up during the last one year due to administrative bottlenecks and no sanction was given for new parks. The Government has moved swiftly to resolve the administrative issues and 13 new textiles parks are approved by the Project Approval Committee (PAC),? Gangwar said.

Highlighting on ?Make in India? perspective in relation to textiles sector Amitabh Kant, Secretary, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP), said that to remain competitive in the global market and penetrate new markets it was necessary for the government to completely remove service tax for the textiles sector for five years, enter into a FTA with the European Union, restore interest rate subvention it should be given top most priority, identify new ports for expediting the process of customs clearance and derive at a competitive labour cost to stay relevant in the market.

?If our customs take four days to clear the goods from a port while Bangladesh does it in 24 hours, we are losing out in the global competition. Customs must clear the goods out of the by 24 hours from all the ports,? Kant added. He cautioned that the sector was bound to lose out markets to countries such as Bangladesh and Taiwan if it fails to bring about a concentrated and integrated approach in its outlook.

Shishir Jaipuria, Chairman, FICCI Textiles Committee, said that FICCI has been proposing a fibre neutral policy by rationalising the duty structure on manmade sector. ?In order to have a double digit growth in export, we have to expand our product basket to include products where we have insignificant presence viz. winter clothing, sportswear, formal clothing, etc. In addition to this, the Central Government should provide incentives to encourage domestic machinery manufacturing in India as much of it is presently being imported from the European Union and China,? Jaipuria said.

He also urged the minister to unveil the textile policy and the technical textile policy at the earliest. ?The new policy aims to achieve $300 billion exports by 2024-25 and envisages creation of additional 35 million jobs. With this ambitious target the textile industry can generate more jobs,? Jaipuria added.

The new textile policy, which is on the anvil, is likely to address the critica