Mills to boost cotton crop

Cotton cultivators and traders would be offered a package to become efficient and effective suppliers of raw materials to the textile industry.

According to the standing committee on cotton under the Indian Cotton Mills Federation's Cotton Development and Research Association (ICMF-CDRA), new technologies relating to cotton-growing would be supplied to growers, along with quality inputs and improved genotypes.

More area would be brought under Bt Cotton and integrated cultivation with better tapping of water resources would also be adopted to improve productivity.

This would help achieve the objective of raising the yield level to about 500 kg per hectare from the current 310 kg per hectare.

This would be able to satisfy the projected cotton requirements of 218 lakh bales by 2006-2007, according to P D Patodia, vice-president of the East India Cotton Association and chairman of the cotton committee of the All India Cotton Trade Associations' conference.

"Branding of cottons should be essential to promote the awareness of good quality cotton from India. There are 25 licences from India to import the supreme variety of cotton from the US. India too should adopt a similar strategy to promote its cotton," said BK Patodia, vice-chairman and managing director of GTN Textiles.

The supply chain at present was also cumbersome with a number of inefficient intermediaries adding to the cost and eroding value.

According to the textile commissioner, Subodh Kumar, "The textile industry will increasingly see consolidation, aggregation and expansion to achieve better value addition. The companies with better technology will see better volumes and automatically get the market share."

The government policy would be fibre specific instead of fibre neutral.

Use of hybrid seed varieties were under study to improve productivity, but registration under the seed act would be made mandatory. This would indicate the yield from the particular variety.

Currently, India was sixth in terms of yield per hectare behind China, Brazil, Australia, USA and Pakistan. Indian yield was expected to touch 400 kg per hectare this year.