Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: Ministry of Textiles on Tuesday announced approval to the extension of its Comprehensive Handicrafts Cluster Development Scheme (CHCDS) up to March 2026. With a total outlay of Rs 160 crore, the scheme intended to present help in terms of infrastructure development, design and style and technologies access, market place help, and more to handicraft artisans and SMEs to improve production and exports. As per Invest India, the domestic textiles and apparel sector has a 5 per cent share in India’s GDP and 12 per cent in export earnings. Textile handicraft solutions integrated bags, shawls, saris, home decor things, and so forth.
“India has great strength in textile handicrafts in places such as Bareily, Moradabad, etc., The artisans making them are micro-units operating in clusters. With the extension of this scheme, these businesses are likely to expand and enhance production with the help of technology and market support. Such goods are value-added products that are loved by foreigners particularly and are willing to purchase them even at a slightly higher price. Hence, the scheme has the potential to help in exports as well of such products,” Delhi-based RK Vij of Indorama Synthetics, which is into the polyester fabric, and also Vice President of The Textile Association (India) told TheSpuzz Online.
According to the ministry, beneath the scheme, soft interventions (measures for improvement) like baseline survey and activity mapping, talent coaching, enhanced tool kits, promoting events, seminars, publicity, design and style workshops, capacity creating, and so forth., will be supplied to SMEs. On the other hand, challenging interventions like popular facility centers, emporiums, raw material banks, trade facilitation centers, popular production centers, design and style, and resource centers will also be granted.
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“It would be beneficial particularly for artisans and micro-entrepreneurs based in small towns and rural areas to ultimately enhance their livelihood as well. Operating in silos may not benefit them from an expansion and design and development perspective but a cluster approach would certainly help them improve the quality of their products and sell more. This scheme can also help boost exports of textile handicrafts as the demand for such products from India is worldwide but there is a lack of platforms that can enable these products to grow internationally,” Mahendrabhai G. Patel, MD, Patel Enterprises told TheSpuzz Online. The firm imports and supplies old machines for textile yarn manufacturing.
Under the scheme, integrated projects will be taken up for development by means of central/state handicrafts corporations/autonomous, body-council-institute/registered co-operatives/ producer firm of artisans/registered particular goal cars (SPV), getting great expertise in handicrafts sector as per requirement and as per the detailed project reports ready for the goal, the ministry stated in its statement. Moreover, handicraft clusters with more than 10,000 artisans will be chosen for the scheme.
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While Sanjay Singh who owns a saree retailer in Moradabad is not conscious of CHCDS but he stated if the scheme aids him to expand his business enterprise to other cities in the coming couple of years, he would be prepared to discover it. “I was out of business from last year until June this year due to Covid. We are seeing customers returning now as more people are vaccinated now and the virus has subsided now to a great extent. If I can not just recover the losses but also accelerate the business by being in the textile cluster then I would certainly want to have a presence there to manufacture and sell sarees,” Singh told TheSpuzz Online.
Importantly, the government in September this year had authorized the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme for the textile sector. The scheme was authorized for man-made fibre (MMF) apparel, MMF fabrics, and 10 segments of technical textiles with a budgetary outlay of Rs 10,683 crore. The scheme will lead to more than Rs 19,000 crore of investment in the textile sector in the 5-year period with a cumulative turnover of more than Rs 3 lakh crore, the government had stated.