Four centres of excellence for specialised textiles to be set up

The government on Thursday said four centres of excellence will be set up soon for specialised textiles with a total investment of Rs. 100 crore.

“Four new Centres of Excellence (CoE) for composites, non-woven, sports tech and indutech segments will be set up with a government funding of Rs 25 crore each,” Textiles Secretary Rita Menon said at a FICCI function here.

These centres would provide testing, standardisation and research facilities at one place for the manufacturers.

The Textiles Ministry has asked institutions like IIT and textiles research associations to join hands with an industry partner for setting up of these facilities.

After launching the Technical Textiles Technology Mission (TMTT), she said the existing four CoE on geo-tech, agro-tech, pro-tech and medi-tech textiles would also be upgraded with an investment of Rs. 14 crore each. Earlier, the government had provided Rs. 44 crore for establishing these centres.

To address the issues of lack of infrastructure and absence of standardisation in the industry, the government launched TMTT with two mini-missions for a period of five years (from 2010-11 to 2014-15) with a fund outlay of Rs. 200 crore.

The objective of the Mini-Mission I is standardisation, creating common facilities and infrastructure support, while Mini-Mission II would focus on extending support for domestic and export market development.

Currently, the market size of Indian technical textile industry is estimated at $9.4 billion.

The Textiles Ministry expects the sector to grow at over 11 per cent annually and touch $16 billion by 2012-13.