A two-member team from the Uttar Pradesh government visited Tirupur to invite knitwear industrialists to invest in a textile cluster to be formed in their state. As part of their two-day programme, Mrityunjay Kumar Narayan, the secretary to UP chief minister, and Sunil Yadav, assistant director of handloom and textiles, visited garment manufacturing units at Nethaji apparel park in New Tirupur and other places, before having a discussion with members of South Indian Hosieries Manufacturers Association (SIHMA) at their office on Wednesday.

Ahead of UP Investors Summit, which will be held on February 21-22, the representatives presented their offers for the interested industrialists. Uttar Pradesh was the seventh state to send its representatives. Earlier, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Odisha have sent their representatives to woo the industrialists.

“Comparing to other states, UP’s offers – subsidies in capital and machinery investments and transportation expenditures, tax benefits, employee provident fund and employee state insurance – were found to be attractive. The UP government team said that they have planned to have special purpose vehicle (SPV) and textile parks to establish needed infrastructure,” said Shashi Agarwal, joint secretary of SIHMA. “They have invited the industrialists to participate in their state’s investors’ summit. They may even have further visits here, if needed. Since Tirupur which has seemed to be attained saturation point in the knitwear business was posing labour shortage and other issues, the industrialists may look for investment options in the states like UP. With a significant part of the industry’s labour force is constituted of people from UP, Bihar, Odisha and north-eastern states, it would be an advantage to get sufficient labour if such investments were made,” Shashi pointed out.
However, the industrialists have admitted that there was no significant migration of such investments in any of the states which were trying to attract the textile sector investments from Tamil Nadu. Because, it would not be easy for other states to replicate the Tirupur’s successful model, they added.
“Since the textile industry is one which can help to generate large number of employments, many states, of late, were trying to woo Tirupur industrialists. There would be expertise in each processes including embroidery and printing in the cluster, which could be thrived significantly with proper knowledge sharing,” said Raja M Shanmugham, president of Tirupur Exporters’ Association.
Even if those states provide attractive investment offers, it would not be more difficult to get either skilled labour force or raw materials or processing units there. For instance, the Karnataka government was trying to lure the industrialists to set up units in an industrial estate in Chamarajanagar district on Tamil Nadu-Karnataka border, there were no takers, said S Govindappan, vice-president of SIHMA.

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