New Delhi, In the grim scenario of inflation, price rise, decreased rate of development, the Ministry of Textile is claming that it is doing well and hopes to look forward to sunny years ahead, even though the depreciation of the US dollar as against the Indian rupee has hit the export earnings of the textile sector reasonably hard.

At a time when traditional weavers like those in Benaras were faced with unemployment, starvation and extreme poverty for lack of patronage and sales in the domestic and export market, a private sector hospitality chasing luckily came to the rescue of the Benaras weavers of saris, by ordering their staff members saree uniforms, giving the impoverished weavers a small relief.

According to the Ministry of Textiles' claims, the UPA government is committed to develop world-class infrastructural and production facilities at handicrafts, handlooms and decentralized power loom clusters with a minimum of 5,000 looms and power looms through adoption of a comprehensive cluster development approach. The megaclusters to be taken up for development during the current financial year are hand looms in Benaras in Uttar Pradesh and Sibsagar Assam – the latter know for production of mooga silk, handicrafts in Narsapur Andhra Pradesh and Moradabad Uttar Pradesh and also power looms in Bhiwandi (Maharashtra) and Erode (Tamil Nadu).

The Textile Ministry in its end of the financial year report has said the first ever Tex-Summit 2007 was organized in association with the industry to deliberate on problems facing it. The Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh in his valedictory address to the session announced a technology mission for textiles, setting up of investment regions for the sector, the finalization of scheme of neighborhood apparel and textile training institutes for job assurance to train four million workers and the revitalization of handloom cooperatives on the pattern of agriculture cooperatives and devising a strategy to expand the market, diversify and realize greater value for textiles products.

The Ministry points out technical textiles used for their technical performance and functional properties are an emerging industry, with a potential to reach a size of US $ 127 billion by 2010. In pursuance of the Prime Minister's announcement, the Government is soon to launch a technology mission on technology textiles to build capacity, upgrade skills create domestic and export market and standardize product development. Besides, the government hopes to implement a development and growth of technical textiles scheme during the 11th five year plan at an estimated cost of Rs. 44 crores.

Four centers of excellence for technical textiles such as meditech, geotech, agritech and buildtech, will be set up under the scheme. The government intends to create a development council for technical textiles to identify the problems of the industry and suggest measures. This is the clearest indicator of the existence and persistence of problems – of raw material, infrastructure, standardization as well as trained manpower availability in this vital sector. The Ministry has put on record the fact that merchandise exports, particularly textiles, witnessed only a gradual growth during a major period of 2007-08. Besides historical factors, the main contributory factors have been the appreciation of the Indian rupee by around 15 percent since October 2006 vis-à-vis the US dollar and a perceptible slowdown of the American economy.

In spite of a difficult global scenario the government claims it is confident of achieving the export targets set out on the National Textiles Policy 2000 and the working group on textiles and jute industry for the 11th Five Year Plan. In 2007-08 the textiles exports were US $ 20.5 billion against the target of US $ 25 billion.

The Ministry claims that the UPA government in order to meet the objectives of Common Minimum Programme had brought in the Central Silk Board Amendment Act 2006. These amendments would bring in qualitative improvement and standardization of the silk sector in the country along with giving greater freedom to silk farmers, reeler and weavers to sell and buy their products in the open market. The government introduced silk mark scheme in June 2004 to promote the distinctive quality of Indian silk products. The silk mark scheme has given a new thrust to the brand promotion of silk involving all stake holders- farmers to exporters. About 36 lakh silk mark labeled products have reached the market.

Handloom sector is said to have seen a resurgence in the past couple of years. fabric production that was witnessing a downturn has made a smart recovery in which produced over 6,108 million sq meters of cloth in 2005-06 and 6,535 million sq meters of cloth in 2006-07 and the production in 2007-08 is expected to be over 7,000 million sq meters.

The annual report also points out that the government has brought into force National Institute of Fashion Technology Act 2006 which provides statutory status to the Institute and formally recognizes its leadership in the fashion technology sector. The Act empowers NIFT to award degrees to its students from 2007 onwards. Last but not the least 22 sick textile mills under National Textile Corporation are to be modernized at a cost of Rs. 530 crores, out of which 15 will be completed by July 08

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