India : AEPC Extends Knitwear Export Quota Deadline

Even as the lorry operators strike has clogged the movement of knitted garment shipments from Tirupur the garment exporters have got a temporary reprieve at the hands of the Apparel Export Promotion Council.

The Council has extended time till April 25 for fulfilling the export quota under the first-come-first-served category from the original deadline of March 31, knitwear industry sources said.

But this has not the solved the problems for majority of the hosiery units in Tirupur whose movement of semi-finished goods and raw materials within the town and nearby processing factories and the movement of finished goods to the marketing centres has seriously been affected by the truckers strike, the industry sources maintained.

Though April and May are considered lean months for Tirupur hosiery units, the large volume of production made for the internal markets are paralysed by the absence of heavy truck operations.

So also are the manufacture of value-added knitwear production and the speciality knitwear production whose manufacture goes beyond seasonality.

Considering the urgency of the export sampling and small volume export consignments, which need to meet the delivery deadlines, the shippers in Tirupur are now compelled to engage all available mode of transport including the call-taxis or omni buses to ferry goods to either Chennai airport or Coimbatore airport.

The daily average knitwear production in Tirupur is said to be in the order of Rs 10 crore and the hassles in ferrying the semi-finished garments or the consignments of the finished knitted goods have severely hampered this volume of production, the knitwear industry sources said.

While the garment units have largely chosen to stagger production to limit the output to the manageable limits, many faced difficulties in sending the goods out to the inland container terminals whose cargo handling have shrunk to almost 50 per cent in the past one week.

The sources in the privately-owned Tirupur Container Terminals Ltd in Tirupur said that as against the normal 1000 TEUs of cargo being handled monthly, this month till April 15, the volume of cargo handled by the terminal was only 300 TEUs.

The emergency ferrying of cargo done with the help of cars or omni passenger buses would be limited to small volume cargo loads not exceeding 50 or 100 cartons and this mode is being attempted in very select cases, the source added.

The Tirupur Exporters Association (TEA) in an SoS addressed to the Union Government has pointed out that a prolonged transporters strike would spell disaster to the knitwear exports.

The TEA President, Mr A. Sakthivel, has said that while the strike by the truckers has crippled the internal movement of goods, the shippers could not reach their consignments to outbound ports as well as to the ICDs.

He appealed to the Prime Minister and the Union Transport Minister to do everything possible to end the lorry operators strike soon so as to save the manufacturing sector.