Textile industry calls for better infrastructure

After consumer durables and textile machineries, now it is the turn of Chinese infrastructure to attract industrialists from India.

The Southern India Mills' Association (SIMA), along with the Textile Export Promotion Council (Texprocil), sent a 10 member delegation to China to study and present a report on the functioning of textile mills there.

The delegation feels that the better infrastructure facilities in China helps the country fare well in industrial growth.

"In China, all the industrial cities are connected by six lane express highways," V S Velayutham, former chairman, Southern India Mills' Association (SIMA), told Business Standard. Most of the units are in industrial zones that are set up with state-of-the-art facilities. They have five to six tier fly-overs and underground tunnels to avoid traffic problems, he said.

With good infrastructure in place, the industry has better scope to flourish, he observed. The transit time taken by the Chinese units to move their goods from factories to destination is just a fortnight, compared with a month's time the Indian textile units have to take.

The delegation also observed that the Chinese make use of geotextiles for laying roads. Geotextile or geosynthetic is a synthetic permeable textile material used with soil, rock or any other geotechnical engineering related material.

Geotextiles can extend the life of roads, increase the load carrying capacity and reduce the incidence of ruts.The use of geotextile not only improves the quality but also creates a demand for these textiles.

SIMA has asked the union government to improve the infrastructure facilities such as roads, railways and ports. "Due to poor infrastructure facilities, the production and transaction costs remain high here," said S V Arumugam, chairman of the association.