Coimbatore : Southern India Mills’ Association (SIMA) on Thursday appealed to Union Textile Minister Smriti Irani seeking intervention and empowering Cotton Corporation of India (CCI) to enforce certain regulations. This was to curb malpractices adopted by certain cotton ginners.

Poor ginning practices adopted by ginners made cotton varieties from the country come under the list of top 10 highly contaminated and having seed coat (trash) content as per the Annual Cotton Contamination Survey conducted by International Textile Manufacturers’ Federation.

The spinning sector and farmers had been suffering during the last few years as some ginners were mixing cotton waste in the virgin cotton, adding water to increase the lint weight and thus affecting the value realisation and quality of final products, SIMA chairman P Nataraj alleged in the letter to the Minister.

However, he appreciated the efforts taken by the Minister and the CCI Chairman and Managing Director for bringing quality norms, especially for gin-out ratio, trash content, moisture content and weight loss. This was besides having the regular quality parameters like staple length and micronaire value.

Rising cotton waste price trend during the last few years indicated that it started from the beginning of cotton season as ginners procured it for adulteration, Nataraj said. Such practices exponentially increased the short fibre content affecting value realisation,productivity and quality of the yarn.

Proposing various interventions, he said the Textile Commissioner, the Textiles Committee secretary, textile research associations and the CCI should be empowered to make periodical inspection at the ginning factories and take necessary action on those adopting malpractices blacklisting them.