'Surat to claim rightful place in export markets'

“We have received consent from the government to provide us a 50 lakh acre plot of land to build a state-of-the-art textile cluster and we expect to receive the land within one year,” DS Agarwal, president of the South Gujarat Chamber of Commerce & Industry (SGCCI) told Fibre2Fashion.

“Here, we will employ a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to invite processing units, and meet their major requirements. The cluster will have a common boiler that supplies steam to all units, while provisions will be made for cheaper electricity, soft water, treatment of effluents, etc. Foreign investors and investors from other states of India too have shown interest in establishing units,” he added.

Sharing other plans for the development of the South Gujarat textile industry, Agarwal informed, “We now want to expand through forward integration. As of now, yarns and fabrics are manufactured the most; we now want to move ahead into garment manufacturing. Secondly, until now we were manufacturing just synthetic fabrics; we would now like to diversify into producing cotton fabrics too.”

There are about 600,000 plain powerlooms, around 100,000 embroidery machines and also 50,000 waterjet and rapier looms in Surat, apart from numerous yarn texturising units in the textile hub. Export of synthetic fabrics from the Surat textile industry is around Rs 20,000 crore.

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Fibre2Fashion News Desk – India