Still playing second fiddle

Know Your Market

Though Ahmedabad lost out to Surat as the textile processing capital of India close to two decades ago, the city's textile processing market is still alive and kicking.

Units here supply cloth to hundreds of wholesalers and semi-wholesalers in the country, while some are into exports. Ahmedabad has around 125 process houses, half of which are in the big league.

Acting as intermediaries between powerlooms which manufacture grey cloth (cloth that is spun into a fibre from thread) and the final product, processing houses wash, straighten, dye, print and process the grey cloth before it is supplied to wholesalers.

Processing houses supply cloth to textile markets such as the New Textile Market at Sarangpur and others across the country. Prices are fixed here, depending on the texture, before selling to semi-wholesalers and retail cloth store owners.

"Bigger units are capable of processing up to two lakh metres of grey cloth per day, while smaller ones have a capacity of around 25,000 metres per day. On an average, a processing house has a capacity of around 60,000 metre a day," says Ahmedabad Textile Processors Association president Mohan Agarwal.

This puts the processing capacity of Ahmedabad-based units at 75 lakh metres per day. However, many a times the units fail to utilise their capacity owing to dearth of funds and shortage of grey cloth.

There are two types of raw materials which arrive in the processing houses of Ahmedabad - synthetic polyester fibre and grey cloth (cotton fibre).

While synthetic polyester fibre comes from Surat, Bhiwandi, Malegaon and other places, cotton fibre comes from south India, Ahmedabad and Surat.

Until late eighties, Ahmedabad was the main textile processing in the country. Those days processing houses never faced raw material shortage because of the presence of several textile mills in the city. Today, production at Ahmedabad's process houses is less than half of Surat's production.

Most process houses in Ahmedabad are close to 100 years old. However, a recent municipal corporation order is posing a threat to Ahmedabad's processing houses, most of which are located in the industrial areas of Narol, Vatva, Odhav and Naroda.

The municipal corporation recently ordered several process houses here to get connected to a mega effluent pipeline that has been laid through industrial estates. This means the units will have to invest more money in upgrading their units to meet the pollution standards.

Some processing houses, which are not registered with this project, were seen releasing effluents into the open in the Shahwadi area of Narol GIDC.