The Confederation of Indian Textile Industry (CITI) actively engaged in a stakeholder consultation organised by the Ministry of Textiles in New Delhi on February 19 to deliberate on the operational framework of the Textile Expansion and Employment Scheme announced in the latest Union Budget.

In her Budget speech on February 1, Union Finance Minister Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman had announced an “Integrated Programme” for the textile sector with five sub-parts, of which the Textile Expansion and Employment Scheme was one. The Scheme aims to “modernise traditional clusters with capital support for machinery, technology upgradation and common testing and certification centres”.

“CITI and the entire industry greatly welcome this proactiveness on the part of the Union Textiles Ministry to make the Textile Expansion and Employment Scheme operational at the earliest. The Scheme has tremendous potential to enhance the competitiveness of India’s textile and apparel sector, it can create more, new, and better-quality jobs for our youths, and enable the sector to leverage the opportunities opening through the FTAs,” CITI Chairman Ashwin Chandran said.

“CITI remains committed to collaborating closely with the Union Textiles Ministry and other key stakeholders to make this Scheme a huge success.”

During the consultation, officials of the Ministry of Textiles highlighted that the textile expansion and employment mission would rest on four pillars: Access to affordable finance, Operational excellence, Enhancement of the Cluster ecosystem, and promotion of Cluster competitiveness, innovation and branding.
The Ministry of Textiles would focus on addressing 6 areas:

- Access to affordable finance
- Technological obsolescence
- Limited downstream capacity
- High attrition rates & Low employee productivity
- Weak cluster infrastructure
- Branding and market access

Issues related to power costs, ease of doing business, environmental compliance, and cotton price volatility would be addressed by other Government ministries or schemes.

It was also pointed out that some of the measures being contemplated by the Ministry of Textiles include:

- Unlocking low-cost global funding for on-lending to textile and apparel entities intermediated by financial institutions
- Providing various subsidies and incentives to drive operational excellence, including employment incentives
- Establishing Textile Seva Kendras to serve as local-level integrated support services for textile and apparel businesses
- Supporting tech-driven startups and innovation pilots demonstrating textile and apparel use cases
- India aims to create a $350 billion textile and apparel industry by 2030, including achieving exports worth $100 billion by that period.