The Indian jute industry represented by the century old Indian Jute Mills Association (IJMA) has been surprisingly disallowed an entry in the recently constituted apex jute body by the Union Textile Ministry- the National Jute Board (NJB) of India. Trade unions, workers and farmers' representatives have also been excluded from the Board.
The Centre has set up the NJB as the only authorized body to deal with all jute related issues within and outside the country.
The Indian jute industry produces 1.6 million tonnes of jute goods valued at around Rs 8000 crore and provides livelihood to four million farmers and around 0.4 million workers in the 66 operating mills of the country.
Though West Bengal has the highest number (52) of operating mills in the country and produces 90 per cent of the country's raw jute there are also no representatives from the West Bengal government in the board. However, there are representatives from the Assam, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh government. These three states have only 10 odd mills and produce a meager nine per cent of the fibre crop.
Says a highly placed official of the West Bengal government, “We shall take up the matter with the Textile Ministry".
According to a prominent jute mill owner who recently walked out of IJMA, "The Union Government has made IJMA irrelevant. We should have at least protested against such an injustice and asked the government for the reason behind IJMA's exclusion. Almost 40 per cent of our produce is consumed by the Govt."
Most trade union representatives said, "JMDC was reduced to a travel and tourism department conducting meaningless fairs across the world and crippling the jute industry by wasting money.”
They alleged that they have been purposefully left out of the NJB by the textiles ministry.The NJB was recently constituted as per the National Jute Board Act 2008 by merging the erstwhile Jute Manufacturers' Development Council (JMDC) and the National Centre for Jute Diversification (NCJD).
NJB started functioning from April 1 2010. The Board set up in pursuance of the National Jute Policy of 2005. Interestingly, the erstwhile JMDC had representations both from IJMA and the trade unions.
Like JMDC, NJB will also run on funds collected from the jute industry as cess. Every year the industry is expected to pay an annual cess of Rs 50- 65 crore for running NJB depending on the price of the jute bags, though it has not been allowed an entry to the Board.
NJB consists of 15 members of which 10 are government representatives and all of them are senior bureaucrats from the textiles ministry and the remaining five are jute technocrats including the Chairman and Managing Director of the almost now defunct Jute Corporation of India (JCI).
For the past three years, JCI has stopped functioning as a price support operating body as raw jute prices are always ruling higher than that of the minimum support price (MSP) of Rs 1575 per quintal (Assam-TD 5).
