Pakistan Textile Exporters Association (PTEA) has urged the government to implement new textile policy immediately for next five years. Textile exporters have expressed grave concern over government's delay to implement new textile policy which carries the measures to increase country's textile exports to US 26 billion dollars by 2019.
Sohail Pasha, Chairman and Rizwan Riaz Saigal, Vice Chairman of PTEA here on Wednesday revealed that government announced several schemes like complete settlement of all outstanding refund claims, rationalisation of refund regime, drawback of local taxes on 10 percent increase in annual exports, establishment of Exim Bank, duty free import of textile machinery and reduction of mark-up rate for export refinance in the budget 2014-15, but due to absence of any textile policy, the sector is not getting benefits from these schemes to improve its efficacy.
They said that funds of 80 billion rupees were earmarked in the federal budget for textile package, however, after a lapse of seven months, these schemes could not be implemented. They said that textile sector contributes about 55 percent to the country's total exports, besides providing direct and indirect millions of jobs but this sector is being run without a textile policy for last six months. They also expressed concern that after the grant of GSP Plus status, instead of increase, textile exports have showed declining trend as exports dropped by 6.38 percent in December as compared to same month of previous year.
PTEA group leader Ahmad Kamal was of the view that country has failed to take full advantage of the trade concessions under GSP Plus scheme. Previous textile policy, which ended on June 30, 2014, failed to meet the envisaged textile exports target of US 26 billion dollars, which is currently no more than US 13.5 billion dollars, he mentioned.