Apparel manufacturers are facing the stiff challenge of the high price of cotton yarn and have urged the Government for immediate intervention.
Raja M. Shanmugham, President, Tirupur Exporters’ Association (TEA) has sent an SOS (Save our Soul) to Piyush Goyal, Union Textile Minister to help remove cotton import duty so as to break the cartelisation of vested interest people in hike in the domestic cotton prices to an abnormal level and also to see ban on cotton exports.
There is 11 per cent total import duty existing on cotton.
In his letter to MoT, Raja said that the apprehension is that the price hike of cotton does heavily impact the garment exporting units, and leads to loss of exports including employment.Moreover, he added, the sustainability of the MSMEs’ garment units would also be much doubtful.
He also sent letters to Textile Mills Associations, SIMA, TASMA and ITF to advice their members not to increase the cotton yarn prices disproportionate to increase in cotton prices as that will totally affect the value-added knitwear garment sector and help to have a win-win situation of both segments of the textile industry.
Notably, the high price of cotton yarn is a major challenge for garment manufacturers and despite MoT’s intervention and strict instructions to the industry stakeholders, this issue has still not been resolved.
Raja said that he has been supporting the farmers for getting a better price for their cotton produce and the concern is that traders are now playing at the cost of survival of apparel manufacturing units.
