Pakistan''s under utilised garment sector has the potential to provide millions of jobs to women and bring about a socio-economic change in the country, Secretary Textiles Zafar Mahmood told Business Recorder here on Saturday.
In an exclusive interview Zafar said "it is a pity that only 5 percent of our cotton production is utilised by the garment sector which provides the highest value addition in textile sector."
This industry is distributed in small, medium and large-scale units most of them having 50 machines and below. Large units are now coming up in the organised sector of the industry. The industry enjoys the facilities of duty free import of machinery and income tax exemptions.
Zafar said this sector has tremendous export performance for the future, as it has three distinctive advantages ie (a) highest capital output ratio (b) highest capital employment ratio and (c) highest export generation.
He said globally garment industry employs over 90 percent women workers as machine operators, cutter of cloth, stitching, pattern designer, design maker, packager, quality controller, value chain processor, manager etc.
He said the disciplined and peaceful women work force in garment industry of China, Bangladesh and Vietnam had not only cut down the cost of production by 50 percent, it had also empowered women and brought about a healthy change in social fabric of these countries.
These countries trained and efficient women workforce has made their textile products cheaper in the international market and adversely affected textile exports of Pakistan and India. Zafar pointed out that because of feudal customs and social constraints, and lack of training facilities in the past, Pakistani women could not work in large numbers in the made-ups, garment, knitwear and other concerned units. They could easily contribute Rs 5000 to 6000 to the monthly family income. He said there are 750,000 stitching machines, 450,000 in organised and 300,000 in non-organised sectors, which were mainly operated by male operators.
He said under the Export Development Plan prepared by the Planning Commission, a well co-ordinated programme has been launched for training of women for employment in the textile industry.
The Textile Garment Skill Development Board has been charged with carrying out skills development of workers for the industry within the 30 garment units. Besides production of contamination free cotton, project financing for small and medium units.
Secretary Textiles expected to train 10,000 to 12,000 stitching machine operators in Karachi, Lahore and Faisalabad garment units every year. The purpose of this training is to build a critical mass of skilled workers.
The other provincial and federal government vocational training institutes have their separate certification programmes to meet industries'' ever-growing needs of skilled workers.
He said the scope of these training programmes is to be widened to terry towel and bed lenin sectors during the current financial year. He said of the total ginned cotton, 30.69 percent is used by made ups (17.48 percent), Knitwear (7.67 percent) and garments (5.52 percent) which fetch about $6 billion of $10.5 billion Textile exports.
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