Labour shortage hits city’s textile industry

Neeraj Bagga
Tribune News Service
Amritsar, June 18

The centuries-old textile industry of the city of the Golden Temple, which was once known as the ‘Manchester of India’, is struggling due to labour scarcity.

Punjab Pradesh Beopar Mandal (PPBM) president Piara Lal Seth says there is a shortage of about 30 to 40 per cent skilled and semi-skilled artisans in the local industrial units. According to him, there are several reasons behind the same. The textile industry records annual turnover in hundreds of crores. A variety of textile products, including suit, shirt, shawl, stole, blanket, denim, tweed and blazers among others, are being manufactured here.

Barring a handful of mega units, the textile industry here comprises micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). Currently, popular kinds of powerloom are powerloom plain, automatic, shuttle-less rapier looms with electronic jacquards and the latest entrant jet shuttle-less looms. A large number of units in the small and medium category have shifted to computerised rapier shuttle-less looms over the last decade. These units now grapple with shortage of technicals hands and engineers to operate and mend these looms.

The computer-operated looms can weave yarn, like cotton, polyester, silk, span, nylon and produce international standard clothes. Several units in the state have turned to the state-of-the-art dobby and shuttle-less looms.

Seth, who is also operating a textile unit, says government’s “indifference” can be judged from the fact that no textile policy has been devised after the one enacted in 2006. He feels that after agriculture, textile is the most labour-intensive sector offering employment to a high number of people.

Another seasoned industrialist, Kamal Dalmia, puts it another way. He says the young generation coming out of technical institutes want to work on those machines which are operated through laptops while sitting in air-conditioned rooms. He says that teachers need to make them psychologically ready to work even in mediocre surroundings.

He says that another reason behind worker shortage was the decline in arrival of migrant workers from the UP and Bihar. He added that arrival of migrant labourers came down by 60 to 70 per cent in the past couple of years.

The city-based textile products is sold in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Southern peninsula states. High quality tweed, blazer, shawls and stoles are also sold to Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Italy, USA, Canada, Brazil, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and other countries.

Rough estimates suggest export from Amritsar stands at about Rs 200 crore.