Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Thursday, Aug 14, 2003
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Thursday, Aug 14, 2003 |
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Industry & Economy
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Textiles WTO trade centre to take up textile project in India G. Srinivasan
New Delhi , Aug. 13 THE Geneva-based International Trade Centre of UNCTAD/WTO has agreed to take up a project in India with the sole objective of assisting the Indian textile and clothing (T&C) industry in improving its competitiveness to face the challenges of the phase-out of the quota regime governing the global trade in textiles and clothing by the end of 2004. To be jointly implemented by the Textiles Committee of the Ministry of Textiles and the trade centre for a span of three years from the current fiscal, the joint project was recently discussed in the meeting of the Textiles Committee, which has approved to take it up, official sources told Business Line here. Given the obvious lack of global perspective and inputs into the development programmes being carried out in India for competitiveness-building of the textile small and medium enterprises (SMEs), the technical cooperation and backup by the trade centre would vastly help in sharpening the competitive edge of Indian textile industry, the the trade centre said. A project note prepared by the the trade centre states the main objective would be to assist selected T&C small and medium enterprise clusters in India to successfully manage the phasing out of the quota system, by retaining trade in T&C as a means for economic and social development and thus poverty reduction. The immediate objective would be to assist the select clusters in creating capacity to manage the market transition from managed trade under the quota regime, through targeted assistance in understanding the T&C-related multilateral trading system, performance comparison with other countries, the introduction of a comprehensive value-chain approach, including e-tailor solutions for foreign customer satisfaction, product development and marketing (forward integration). The sources said the implementation methodology of the project would include thus: the trade centre would field team of international and national consultants to carry out activities aimed at fulfilling the stated objectives, besides providing support/guidance to their headquarters. The Textiles Committee would be the joint partner in implementation of the project in the identified clusters as well as at country level. For this purpose, the Committee would work in close concert with various export promotion councils, Central and State Governments and industry associations. While the funding required for implementation of the project would be mobilised by the the trade centre with most of the costs being borne by the the trade centre, the Textiles Committee is expected to provide its infrastructure and manpower in implementation of the project activities. As par of preparatory work for launching the project, the Textile Committee is planning to hold training programmes on IT-based benchmarking tool developed by the the trade centre exclusively for garment industry. The FIT is a software-based benchmarking tool for SMEs in the garment sector, which compares and positions the enterprise performance of one firm with respect to a group of other national and global firms on a completely confidential basis. "Providing an analytical basis for identification of strengths and weaknesses in the global performance of an enterprise, the FIT helps participating enterprise prioritise areas of action to improve their competitiveness," the trade centre said. The sources said that with the help of this tool, garment exporter could compare his efficiency vis-à-vis the best in the world. It is proposed to hold three workshops on this benchmarking tool at Ludhiana, Bangalore and Tirupur in the last week of September/October 2003, the sources noted.
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