CII south conference on textile industry from April 8 in Chennai

The Confederation of Indian Industry, Southern region (CII-SR) in association with The Southern India Mills Association (SIMA) is organising 'Comptex 2005' - a conference on 'Sustainable Global Competitiveness of Textile Industry' on April 8 and 9, 2005 at the SITRA Auditorium, Coimbatore.

The textile industry contributes 4 per cent of national GDP, according to a CII-SR release. India's share is only 3.5 per cent of the estimated total global trade of $ 356 billion.

To tap this opportunity, the Indian textile industry needs to reorient, restructure and enhance its competitive strength and global positioning. The industry must achieve cost efficiencies, focus on quality, productivity and improvement in delivery systems.

Addressing a press conference in Chennai today, Manikam Ramaswami, chairman, Textiles Sub-Committee, CII-SR and chairman and managing director, Loyal Textile Mills Ltd said that the main objective of Comptex 2005 conference is to evolve a clear roadmap for the Indian textile industry to sustain its global competitiveness and to position the Southern region as the key driver of growth in making India a global leader in the textile sector.

The conference sessions would focus on key areas such as evolving a roadmap to promote the Indian handloom sector by focusing on skill upgradation of workers and deliberate on strategies for repositioning, brand building, training, marketing and creating niche and export markets for the growth of handloom sector.

Other areas of focus include self-sufficiency in cotton in the Southern region through adoption of innovative techniques in cotton cultivation, focus on contract farming, policies to facilitate micro credit to farmers for cultivation on a larger scale and access to information on high yield and high quality seeds to increase cotton yield.

Adoption of latest processing and environment- friendly technologies for increasing efficiency and productivity especially in the woven and knit segment will also be discussed.

The conference will also focus on exploring opportunities in 'technical textiles' "" the unexploited non-apparel markets both in domestic and overseas in industrial application, home textile and auto textiles. In India 93 per cent of polyester is used in apparel industry as against the world average of 41 per cent, which indicates the level of unexploited markets in non-apparel sector.

Key speakers at the two-day conference include T C Venkat Subramanian, chairman and managing director, EXIM Bank, Vijay Venkataswamy, chairman, SIMA, A Sakthivel, chairman, Apparel Export Promotion Council ,Vikram Mohan, managing director, Pricol Technologies, Motoo Yoshika, SUMITOMO Corporation, Japan, J Stillger, A Monforts, Textilmaschinen GmbH, Germany, Ulrich Von Christen, CEO, Erbatech Gmbh, Germany and Massimiliano Previdi, Simem Srl, Italy.