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| CAREER IN THE TEXTILE INDUSTRY |
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| IS IT LUCRATIVE? |
The textile and clothing industry is facing an immense challenge in mobilizing workers to fulfill production requirements, as many of them are moving to other well-paying jobs.
The crisis-like situation comes at a time when India is losing its competitive edge in export markets due to rising input costs, amid stiff competition from neighbouring nations like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and China.
Immediate steps to be taken to fight this situation and one cannot assure that this is the best industry to be chose as a career in the prevailing circumstances.
The textile firms in Ludhiana, Amritsar, Surat, Ahmedabad and Kolkata say that their units are utilizing only 50 to 60 per cent of production capacity due to severe labour shortage. They are worried that their margins are shrinking as they are not able to meet sale targets. Many textile owners are contemplating to move production units to interior areas where workers are available at low wages.
The current workforce in Indian textile and clothing industry is about 35 million with an equal number employed in allied industries.
This should move up to 47 million by 2015, including five million skilled workers and two million technical and other personnel, if growth projections are to be met.
Most workers earning about Rs. 7,000 a month are of migratory nature. They move from the agricultural sector to cities after the sowing season for half of the year and get back to villages when the harvest season starts.
But the government’s successful social sector schemes like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is discouraging labour migration from rural to urban areas. The MGNREGA assures them 100 days of wage employment guarantee in a financial year.
There is a rampant shortage of workers in all segments of textile value chain that begins from cotton crop and leads to branding and retailing.The industry needs to pay higher wages, provide health insurance and ensure that factories comply with internationally acceptable standards, in order to improve the situation and make the industry more lucrative of people to choose as a careeroption.
Textile and clothing industry will not be able to upgrade technologically quickly and will find difficult to survive in export and domestic markets unless a massive skill development programme is launched to bridge the gap of managerial and technical cadre of professionals for the fibre-to-fashion chain of textile, apparel and retail industries. The government needs to think of holistic measures to improve the industry situation as a whole than working on training and employment drives….. as people are choosy and will choose industry sectors which are more paying and caring in comparison to the textile industry unless and until drastic measures are taken to help the industry as a whole.
Let us take clues from our nearest neighbor Srilanka:
Sri Lanka for the first time has seen its monthly export earnings surpassing the US $ 1 billion mark in March this year and the total export earnings during the first half of 2011 grew to a strong US $ 5,106 million from US $ 3,642 million over 2010. During the first half of 2011 industrial product exports has increased by a huge 49 percent. Nearly 87 percent of the export earnings during the first half of 2011 have derived from ten product categories. Textile and garments alone has contributed to a staggering 42.3 percent of the earnings.
Sri Lanka's Competitive Advantages in the Garment Sector | ||||
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