Gadoon Industrial Estate emerging as textile city

Gadoon Industrial Estate was emerging as textile city where seven textile units, with a much improved capacity of more than 0.4 million spindles, were spinning the cotton in the area popularly known as industrial graveyard of the province, sources in textile sector told Business Recorder on Monday.
The sources said that unlike other industries, textile units in the NWFP were in much stable condition due to the better utilisation of the incentives granted by the governments.
In the initial stage, the industrial units in Gadoon Industrial Estate of the District Swabi were issued loans on three per cent mark up rate.
"To facilitate the establishment of industry, the investors were granted 50 percent concession in electricity tariff and zero percent duty on the import of the machinery," said a leading businessman of the province.
The textile units were emerging as successful ventures and the installation of one lakh spinning spindles is definitely an achievement.
According to an expert such a big number of the spindles is equal to eight textile units. Due to favourable conditions the owners of the textile industrial units have also made arrangements for powerful electric generators. Gas connections have also been provided to the units.
"The only difficulty textile units face in the province was the transportation expenses on cotton. However, this problem has been solved by importing quality cotton from Afghanistan and Central Asia. Beside, cotton from Punjab is easily available to the industrial units in NWFP than Sindh."
In this connection, when Business Recorder contacted Haji Muhammad Hussain Shah, a renowned industrialist, he attributed this success to sincere and hard efforts of the owners of the industrial units of Gadoon Industrial Estate but disagreed with the spinning of the imported cotton from Afghanistan and Central Asia.
He said that textile was a big industry and the expenses of transportation could not affect it due to its large turn over.
The total number of the spindles was more than 0.4 million giving employment opportunity to about 200,00 workers, he informed.