Introduction

The Textile Engineering Industry (TEI) is, undoubtedly, one of the largest component of the Indian capital goods industry and has contributed significantly to the growth of the Indian textile industry. The TEI directly employs about 50,000 workers and has capital investment in the range of US $ 423.93 Mn., with an installed capacity of US $ 920.54 Mn. It covers over 700 machineries and equipments manufacturing units; over 250 units produce complete machinery and the remaining 450 units produce spare parts, components and accessories of the machinery. The major Indian companies that have a strong presence in the TEI include Lakshmi Machine Works (Coimbatore), Premier Evolvics, Veejay Lakshmi, Himson, Precitex, Delux Bearings among others.

The technological competitiveness of the Indian textile engineering industry presents a full spectrum of technological capabilities. While, there are few units manufacturing spinning and allied machinery close to the international players in terms of product design capability, process design capabilities and process technology, technological capabilities of most of the players manufacturing other than spinning and allied machinery is severely limited.

The fortunes of this industry are inextricably linked with that of textile industry. High degree of co-relation between the performances of the two sectors is further accentuated by high elasticity of textile engineering industry to changes in the textile industry. The capital goods value added contributes about 10.5 percent of the total textile manufacturing value added, thus establishing textile industry as a key end user deriving the performance of the latter.

The textile industry has been doing extremely well during the last few years in terms of production & export and has been investing heavily in expansion and modernization of capacity. The strong demand from domestic and export market coupled with conducive policy environment provided by the Govt. has catalyses the growth of the textile industry. The Technology Upgradation Fund Scheme (TUFS) launched by the Govt. has facilitated investment in state of the art / near state of the art benchmarked textile machinery eligible under TUFS. During the last eight years of the operation of TUFS, about US $ 28.86 Bn. worth of projects have been covered under TUFS involving installation of roughly US $ 17.32 Bn. of modern machinery during the period.

Production trend of textile machinery

The sustained growth of the textile industry has also propelled the production of the textile engineering industry from US $ 244 Mn. in 2002-03 to US $ 618 Mn. in 2006-07 a compound annual rate of growth of 26 percent during the last five years. The maximum growth has been in the spinning and allied machinery which has increased at the annual rate of 38 percent. The year on year growth of TEI has also been fluctuating in the range of 8 percent to 33 percent during the last five years. The export intensity of this industry, which was in the range of 20-28 percent of production, in the last two years has declined to 17.47 percent in 2006-2007.