TT Limited's Sanjay Jain is new president of NITMA

Apart from NITMA, Jain (46) has held several important positions in various other associations across the country. He is deputy chairman of Northern India Textile Research Association (NITRA) and vice president of Federation of Hosiery Manufacturers' Associations of India (FOHMA) and West Bengal Hosiery Association (WBHA). He is also a committee member/special invitee of CITI, FICCI Textiles, SIMA, Texprocil, IAAI and AIOE. He is also a regular speaker in conferences and regularly writes articles in various magazines. 

Combining his industry experience of almost 2 decades with professional qualifications (MBA from IIM-Ahmedabad, ACMA, ACS), Jain is also involved directly and indirectly in policy making as member of the Textile Sector Council of West Bengal government and Government of India's Textile Mentor Committee. He was also part of the sub-committee on Textiles & Apparels for the 12^th Five Year Plan.

Speaking on the occasion, Jain said that the industry is going through unprecedented challenges, which has pushed the industry to the brink. He, however, added that there is a great opportunity for the textile industry to capture the space being vacated by the Chinese industry due to their spiraling costs.

While being excited at the industry being at a very important threshold, he was worried about the immediate crisis of the industry due to isolated increase in cotton prices in India while global prices were stable. The recent RBI Financial Stability Report shows that the highest slippages to NPAs from Standard account in 2015 were in textiles (8.8 per cent). Textile industry also has high stressed advance ratios and high percentage of weak companies.

Jain said that he was confident that the textiles ministry under the new dynamic leadership of Smriti Irani would understand the problems of the industry and reverse its 2 years blind eye attitude towards the spinning industry. He was hopeful that all pending subsidies would be immediately released to provide some liquidity to the industry.

NITMA's annual general meeting (AGM) also elected Rajiv Garg, managing director of Garg Acrylics as senior vice president and Manish Bagrodia as vice president. Outgoing president Hardyal Singh Cheema handed over the baton to the new team.