Textile Industry


Modernisation is a continuous process and there should be concerted efforts to modernize both machinery and manufacturing processes regularly. It is general experience that units which maintained the process of modernisation systematically could manage to sustain their growth in the long run.


Modernisation in fact is needed to increase production, reduce the cost of production, rationalize labour, reduce maintenance and power cost per unit of production etc. Due to a number of factors, the vast majority of the textile units in India never tried to regularly modernize their units. As a result the Indian Textile Industry had been suffering from technological obsolescence since the beginning of the 20thcentury.


Backlog of modernisation


There was a census of machinery carried out by the Office of the Textile Commissioner during 1979-80. Based on this census, the modernization requirement was estimated as ` 1,500 crore.During the 1980s, the Government introduced a soft loan scheme for modernization with an outlay of `750 crore. It turned out the main beneficiary of the Scheme was the spinning sector. After the liberalization of the import policy in 1991 it is by and large only the spinning sector, which became very vibrant and there was huge capacity expansion in the decade of 90s. Here also all the spinning machinery discarded/replaced by the textile mill industry found a new home in small spinning units located in and around Coimbatore-Tamilnadu,Ahmedabad- Gujarat and some other places in the country. Still, by and large,the spinning sector got modernized and large number of 100% Export Oriented Units came into existence.


Read Full Article

 

The article is written by Mr. S. Chakrabarty, who is a Secretary General, Textile Machinery Manufacturers' Association (India).


Originally Published in New Cloth Market, August-2011