Innovations, incentives direly needed to boost textile sector.

FAISALABAD -- Like many other sectors, country's textile industry is also facing serious challenge for its survival and valuably contributing to national exports for generating foreign exchange and putting economy on strong footing.

Lack of high performance yarn and fiber like carbon and aramid fiber, devaluation of rupee against dollar, dwindling cotton crop, costly energy and rising cost of production, lack of innovation and advanced testing facilities and validation of technical materials like anti-microbial activity, fire retardant, porosity, filtration efficiency are the major issues confronting this industry.

Industrialists in Faisalabad like any other part of the city are equally worried about the vibrant future of this industry with this 'Manchester of Pakistan' contributing around 60 percent share in total textile exports of the country and having unique privilege to cater 80 percent textile needs of domestic market.

Textile industry in Faisalabad is as old as Pakistan as the city had only 5000 spindles at the time of independence that today counts in hundreds of thousands even at a single unit. Although the city has estimated 85 composite textile units, the number of SMEs is countless with majority of them not listed in official books.

'Textile is the biggest industrial sector contributing 58 percent in our exports, 45 percent jobs and 85 percent share in GDP,' said Dr Yasir Nawab, Dean Faculty of Textile Engineering at National Textile University Faisalabad (NTUF).

'Pakistan is second to Bangladesh among the countries mostly depending on textile exports. But its textile exports growth remained quite low in comparison to other regional countries,' he said.

'Textile care is very important when dealing with textile goods. But, we lack technical expertise and latest technology and requires specialized industrial laundries to ensure durability of functional treatments and coatings,' Dr Yasir said.

He said that Pakistan is ranked at 107th position among the 140 countries in the global competitiveness index and at 125th in the category of human skills.

'Being highly innovative, technical textile has become versatile in the world. But, its share in Pakistan's export is very low and adopting it can help us capture big world markets,' Dr Yasir remarked.

He quoted example of India whose textile sector grew very fast after adopting technical textile. 'Therefore, we direly need specialized centers of excellence and competitiveness for...

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