Coimbatore, Jun 30 : Tirupur Exporters’ Association (TEA) today appealed to the textile mills to save the knitwear garment export sector, as the cotton yarn price increase by Rs.20 per kg this month has literally pushed the knitwear garment export sector into a difficult situation and to sustain in the competitive global environment.

The beleaguered knitwear export sector has been passing through a challenging business environment further to implementation of GST, which led to the continuous declining of knitwear exports month on month basis since October 2017 after completion of three months transition period and the decline exports for the second half yearly period of 2017-18 was 21 per cent.

The most worrying factor was that the negative trend in exports growth was continuing in the current financial year also and the average decline of knitwear exports in the month of April and May was 34 per cent, TEA president, Raja M Shanmugham said in a release.

Stating that the sector was now only booking the orders, business have now started to look ahead and poised to bring back the industry from brink after prolonged one year period lull , he said that the increase in yarn prices at this point of time would derail the industry and the aftermath effect would be severe as not only the knitwear garment sector will get affected but alsothere will be a boomerang effect on the Textile mills.

Considering this crucial concern and the overall benefit oftextile industry, he appealed to the mills not to increase the cottonyarn prices and also not to stop cotton yarn supply.

On the increasing of cotton yarn prices, Raja M Shanmugham said he has already met Union Minister of Textiles Smt.Smriti Irani and requested to mandate the Cotton Corporation of India (CCI) to ensure the availability of sufficient quantity with desired quality cotton to protect the interest of farmers, textile industry and also employment.

The point of contention is that the impact of increase in cotton prices has made the textile mills to increase the yarn prices whichultimately affect the downstream value added sectors like weaving, knitting, garmenting, made ups, particularly value added exporters as they could not revise the price upwards immediately as the prices were fixed more than three to five months ago, he said.

He said that he had also met Principal Secretary to Ministry of Handloom and Textiles, Tamil Nadu, K Phanindra Reddy yesterday, and discussed cotton crisis arisen further to wrong policies of CCI and emphasized the need to cut down the escalating cotton prices.

Reddy has assured to take up the issue with Centre through Tamil Nadu Chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Raja Shamnugham said.