Union Minister of Commerce and Industry, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution and Textiles, Shri Piyush Goyal today asked stakeholders of the textile industry to strive to move up the value chain and focus on products of high value. He was interacting with the beneficiaries of the Production Linked Incentive Scheme (PLI) for textiles at a review meeting in New Delhi.

He asked the beneficiaries to focus on improving the quality of textile products made in India to make them world-class. The USP of Indian textile industry must not be restricted to cheap labor, the Minister opined. He asked that textile sector workers be paid fairly, given social security and brought to the formal sector.

Shri Goyal acknowledged the textile sector's inherent capability to create employment and drive both growth and exports and said that textiles was one of the sectors identified by Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi as an industry with immense potential.

The Minister said that the centre was looking at PLI 2.0 and instructed officials of the Ministry to undertake extensive and exhaustive stakeholder consultations before finalizing the contours of PLI 2.0. He asked them to make PLI 2.0 robust and emphasized that PLI 2.0 would empower the sector to compete globally with top exporting countries like China, Vietnam.

The review meeting under the Chairmanship of Hon’ble Minister was attended by representative of 49 companies and key dignitaries of Ministry of Textiles. Under the PLI Textile Part 1, 67 applicants had applied out of which 64 were selected and out of these 64 companies 55 companies have formed participant companies. The proposed investment during the entire tenure of the scheme is INR 19,789 Cr out of which INR 1,536 Cr. has been invested so far.

Review meeting was held to understand the implementation status of the projects under the Scheme and for resolving their issues. Companies complimented the Ministry for PLI scheme. At the meeting, several procedural issues were clarified for the sake of easy understanding. NICDC shared the ready availability of land with plug and play facility at Dholera, Aurangabad, Greater NOIDA and Indore.

Minister also directed the Ministry team to actively engage with the participants and resolve state and administrative issues they faced. He urged textile industry players to work with a sense of duty, a 'kartavya bhavana', aim higher and dream bigger to take Indian textile industry to greater heights.

 

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AD/KP/MS