TRADE RECEIVABLES

A decade before… in Textiles.

China adopted Mass Production.
India into customization.
i.e Walmart and Zara.

Indian Mills
Arvind, Lakshmi, Vardhman…
Century old Quality Mills.

Chinese mills, 30 to 40 years age, relatively younger;
Set up in rural areas;
By farming peasants and
Secondary pass outs.

There is a saying:

For items,
Under30$, leave it to China;
Above 150$. Leave it to Europe;
In the middle, give it to India.

The result,
China’s textile exports are at 120 billiom $;
6 times than that of India.

Then came,

India’s Mass Producers;
Chiripals, Jindals, Aarvees, Etcos, Alps, Sintex ….

Perceived by Garment Manufacturers as NBMCs;
Non-Banking Merchandising Companies;
Giving extended Credit without collateral;
Rather than Fabric Suppliers.

On the other end,
There are Indian Retail giants,
Aditya Birlas, Future Retails, ITC, Westside, Yes Arvind;
Adopting JIT, means no orders in lean seasons.

For Garment Manufacturers,
Exporters make payment 3 to 6 months;
Stare at all along AW;
Stare at all along SS.

Trade receivables stretched;
All along Supply Chain.
From Yarn to Retailers.

Many went Burst,
Receivables become Non Receivables.

It is the Indian Culture;

Will Covid-19 make it worst for the better?
With New Supply Chain terms for
Indian “Kanban” System.

Fashion Makes Environment in Danger

We often encounter the statement that Textile Industry is consuming more water.

It is always debatable as

 i)Environmental perspective of Europeans differ from US or India and 

ii)Economic Prospective of US differs from Europe or India.

These noises are often made by buying houses to justify non tariff barriers rather than of real concern.

However these concern always lead to some improvements in process.

On the otherhand, it still help the buyers to discriminate and negotiate with the poor suppliers to make them poorer.

We will see one by one, their claims:

1.One of the biggest culprit is cotton farming!!! (Account 4% of Global Fresh Water usage):

i)US, China and India are the three major cotton producing countries.

ii)It is one of the agricultural commodity for these countries and livlihood of their farmers. The soils are conducive for cotton farming.

iii)Cotton is one of the best renewable fibre available in the world.

iv)In countries like India, the major area is rainfed, multiple plants with pulses and hence low yield - which makes the claim futile.

Each country differs in their perspective in Cotton farming.

In the past, US spent billions to produce Corn fibre at 50cents/lb to compete with cotton and found it is economically unviable.

2.Cotton Processing requires additional 0.8% of Global Water Usage:

i)This is a real concern. Processing, Washing Clothes Using Washing Machine requires additional water.

ii)The point to note is that whether cotton or any other cloth, still you need to consume water.

3.Pollution is the real concern:

i)Textile Dyeing is one of the largest polluter of clean water. In many cases, it leads to run off, thereby polluting nearby water sources. It is a threat in future to living conditions in countries like India and China.

ii)Vibrant colours, prints and fabric finishes are appealing features of fashion garments, but many of these are achieved with toxic chemicals.

iii)Only fashion experts / consultants can help it out by carefully strategising their SS / AW collections with low impact simple dyes. They can make it simpler if they want. Instead, they still demand those tertiary colors and act as they are concerned with polluting environment.

iv)For examples - Cotton Jeans a decade before were made with 1.5% Indigo, but fashion consultants wanted over 4% for deep shades and stripping the dye with enzymes, chlorine bleachings in subsequent garment washing. Do not believe them - they say a pair of Jeans consumes over 8000 litres of water. They demand heavy dose of colours on one hand and shell out tears on the other.

v)I do not see any final consumer is demanding a particular coating, designs etc. He select among the options presented. Intermediaries can make it simpler if they want.

4.Alternative Fibres:

i)Alternative suggested by the experts are linen, hemp, cellulosic fibres.

ii)Linen/ Hemp are bast fibres and contain lignin. 100% use of these fibres in any garment will itch your skin and you need a itchguard.

iii)The fabrics made out of bast fibres will have short life and end with holes after repeated washing.

iv) Cellulosic fibres need Wood - it only make deforestration. India had an experience of closing down South India Viscose in Uthagamandalam on these grounds.

v)In the past, US made a sincere effort and spent billions to produce Corn fibre at 50cents/lb to compete with cotton and found it is economically unviable.

5.Indian Mom of Last Generation: Consume less, Cherish your Choice & Extend Usage:

Indians remember, the Wedding Silk Sarees their mothers, used, cherished and preserved for over 5 decades with only dry cleaning. Now also, Indian Art Silk Sarees costing 150 Rs or 2$ lasting for a decade.

Indians always use clothes which have greater life span and minimum use.

The gist is that Fashion makes Environment in danger and the solution is in the hands of SS/AW Experts.

THE FLAWED SPIN TO INDIA'S COTTON STORY (Source:The Hindu;22.1.20)

The country’s hybrid seed model for cotton favours seed companies over farmers

Genetically Modified (GM) pest resistant Bt cotton hybrids have captured the Indian market since their introduction in 2002. These now cover over 95% of the area under cotton, with the seeds produced entirely by the private sector. India’s cotton production in 2019 is projected as the highest ever: 354 lakh bales. Bt cotton’s role in increasing India’s cotton production, which GM proponents have highlighted as being instrumental, has also been used to argue for extending GM technology to increase food crop yield. However, critics say that Bt cotton hybrids have negatively impacted livelihoods and contributed to agrarian distress, particularly among resource-poor farmers.

The Indian experience

This year, India is expected to be the world’s largest cotton producer, surpassing China in output. However, India’s productivity (yield per unit area), is much lower than other major cotton-producing countries, meaning a much larger area is used for cotton production. Indeed, India’s productivity has been only a third of these countries for over four decades. Why is this so? It cannot be explained by agronomic or socio-economic differences because these countries include both developed and developing countries, and different geographies. Which feature of cotton cultivation in India differs from other countries and might account for this large anomaly?


India is the only country that grows cotton as hybrids and the first to develop hybrid cotton back in 1970. Hybrids are made by crossing two parent strains having different genetic characters. These plants have more biomass than both parents, and capacity for greater yields. They also require more inputs, including fertilizer and water. Though hybrid cotton seed production is expensive, requiring manual crossing, India’s low cost of manual labour make it economically viable. All other cotton-producing countries grow cotton not as hybrids but varieties for which seeds are produced by self-fertilization.


A key difference between hybrids and varieties is that varieties can be propagated over successive generations by collecting seeds from one planting and using them for the next planting; hybrid seeds have to be remade for each planting by crossing the parents. So for hybrids, farmers must purchase seed for each planting, but not for varieties. Using hybrids gives pricing control to the seed company and also ensures a continuous market. Increased yield from a hybrid is supposed to justify the high cost of hybrid seeds. However, for cotton, a different strategy using high density planting (HDP) of compact varieties has been found to outperform hybrids at the field level.

Cotton planting strategies

For over three decades, most countries have been growing cotton varieties that are compact and short duration. These varieties are planted at high density (5 kg seeds/acre), whereas hybrids in India are bushy, long duration and planted at ten-fold lower density (0.5 kg seeds/acre). The lower boll production by compact varieties (5-10 bolls per plant) compared to hybrids (20-100 bolls/plant) is more than compensated by the ten-fold greater planting density. The steep increase in productivity for Brazil, from 400 to 1,000 kg/hectare lint between 1994 and 2000 coincides with the large-scale shift to a non-GM compact variety. Cotton is a dryland crop and 65% of area under cotton in India is rain-fed. Farmers with insufficient access to groundwater in these areas are entirely dependent on rain. Here, the shorter duration variety has a major advantage as it reduces dependence on irrigation and risk, particularly late in the growing season when soil moisture drops following the monsoon’s withdrawal. This period is when bolls develop and water requirement is the highest. The advantages of compact varieties over hybrids are considerable: more than twice the productivity, half the fertilizer (200 kg/ha for hybrids versus 100 kg/ha for varieties), reduced water requirement, and less vulnerability to damage from insect pests due to a shorter field duration. Yet, India has persisted with long-duration hybrids, many years after benefits of compact varieties became clear from global experience.

Impact of policy

If one grants that India would have benefited greatly from deployment of compact cotton varieties as supported by the evidence, then the question arises: why was this not done? Two phases of policy have contributed to this situation. The first is before GM cotton, when India persisted with hybrids from 1980-2002, while other countries shifted to HDP. Why was such a significant innovation in cotton breeding ignored for so long and what kept public sector institutions and cotton research centres from developing and releasing such varieties? The answers lie with the agricultural research establishment. The second phase where the question of hybrids versus compact varieties could have been considered, was at the stage of GM regulation when Bt cotton was being evaluated for introduction into India. It would not have been out of place to have evaluated the international experience, including the context of introduction of this new technology. Information should have been considered on the form in which it would be deployed (hybrids versus varieties). Importantly, agro-economic conditions where it would be used should have been a guiding factor. However, the scope of evaluation by the GM regulatory process in India was narrow, and did not take this into account. Consequently, commercial Bt hybrids have completely taken over the market, accompanied by withdrawal of public sector cotton seed production. The Indian cotton farmer today is left with little choice but to use Bt hybrid seed produced by private seed companies.

Farmer distress

The current annual value of cotton seed used for planting is about ₹2,500 crore, and that of lint cotton produced is ₹68,000 crore. Therefore, it appears that the interests of the cotton seed industry have constrained the very much larger value of cotton production and the overall cotton industry. It is likely that production levels could have been much higher, with considerably lower risk and input costs, had compact varieties been developed and used in India. Agricultural distress is extremely high among cotton farmers and the combination of high input and high risk has likely been a contributing factor. Compact varieties would have significantly reduced distress as well as increased yield. Therefore, the hybrid seed model for cotton that India, and India alone, has followed for over three decades, is inferior to the HDP model being used in other countries on three important counts: much lower productivity; higher input costs; and increased risk particularly for low resource farmers in rain-fed areas.

There are several takeaways from the experience of Bt cotton worldwide, and in the context of hybrids in India. First, we must be clear that the outcome of using a technology such as Bt is determined by the context in which it is deployed, and not just by the technology itself. If the context is suboptimal and does not prioritise the needs of the principal stakeholders (farmers), it can have significant negative fallouts, especially in India with a high proportion being marginal and subsistence farmers. Second, there is a need for better consultation in policy, be it agriculture as a whole or crop-wise. Notably, India is a signatory to international treaties on GMO regulation (the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety), which specifically provide for inclusion of socioeconomic considerations in GMO risk assessment. However, socioeconomic and need-based considerations have not been a part of GMO regulatory process in India.

It is important to recognise that adoption of any new technology such as Bt is a choice and not an imperative. For example, some of the major cotton-producing countries such as Brazil (until 2012) and Turkey (up to the present) have achieved high productivity without the use of GM cotton by using alternative pest-management approaches. The purpose of risk assessment in GMO regulation is to enable exercising of this choice by careful and comprehensive evaluation of costs and benefits. In the case of Bt cotton hybrids, the benefits were limited and costs may well have been too high, particularly for resource-poor farmers.

Imran Siddiqi is an emeritus scientist at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad. The views expressed are personal

SAFTA

Bangladesh(BD) buys cotton from India.
Cotton Travels from Rajkot to Dhaka

Bangladesh buys yarn from India.
Yarn Travels from Coimbatore to Dhaka

Bangladesh buys chemicals from India.
Chemicals Travels from Ankleshwar to Dhaka

Bangladesh imports Machineries.
India has TUFS and subsidies at State and Centre level

Bangladesh does incur Power cost.
Bangladesh does incur Manpower cost but lower

Bangladesh Sells Garments to India at much much lesser price
Garments Travel to Kolkotta, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai


Indian Mills make losses
Several jobs have been lost
TUF become meaningless


Mathematics does not work
Logics failed to understand

It is a magic called SAFTA(South Asian Free Trade Agreement)

Is it not an opportunity?
In future India can make trade agreements
Reverse way with all countries like Bangladesh did


So that our Employement in Textile Industry,
Equivalent to Bangladesh population
Will Prosper

WHEN DENIM GOES SPIRITUAL – TURMERIC DENIM

In recent years the usage of natural dyes has witnessed its revival.The natural dyes are eco-friendly, harmless and non-toxic in nature.

Turmeric plays an important role in yore old great Indian Tradition, as an antiseptic agent to protect their immunities.

Be it using in all dishes of Vegetables, Sambar or
applying turmeric to the bride and groom or
In festivals – like Khandobha (Sonyachi Jejuri).

What we may not know is turmeric has been used as a fabric dye for hundreds of years.

Not only yellow color is produced through dyeing with turmeric dyeing but many other colors are produced when turmeric dye is mixed with other colors, like orange, green, blue color with addition of indigo and red color with addition of kusum flowers and mango rind.

We might think how both red and yellow colors are produced through turmeric dye in its original form, the answer lies in the type of liquid used for concentration. When the solution is prepared in acidic liquid it would produce yellow dye and when alkali liquid is used it would produce red dye.

The challenge of creating the ideal jeans is never-ending. Thanks to antiseptic nature, Turmeric Denim, may offer a new R&;amp;amp;amp;D Avenue.

Metrics – Global Raw Material Competitiveness of Indian Cotton Textile Industry

 1. Cotton, the major raw material accounts for 40 to 70% of Yarn, in many cases Fabric Cost.

2. The Trend of International Cotton Prices from 1973 to 2008 is given in Chart below.

3. Raw Material Competitiveness is the difference between the International Cotton Prices and the Domestic Cotton Prices. At the organization level it refers to procurement cost. Yes, the procurement cost - as cotton prices fluctuate 43% within a year.

4. The trend is sharp from 2009 onwards – which is attributed to the commodity till 2011 and the currency from 2012 onwards.

5. Our Home Textiles is becoming stronger in global market. 

THE SPONTANEOUS HEATING AND IGNITION OF WET COTTON BALES

Off late, Several Fires happening in Finished Godowns and Raw Material Godowns.

There are internal Safety Committees and Third Party Audits.

Fabrics worth Thousands of Crores are converted into ashes and Cottons worth Hundred of Crores are burnt down in Spinning Mills.

"Known causes" of a series of Cotton Godown fires are concluded as Spontaneous Heating and Ignition of Wet Bales.


Seven decades before

In England, a series of 346 cotton ware house fires happened within a short time, started with a baby step and reached an ugly stage.

Insurance companies are not sure, whether 10 bales are burnt down for a claim of 1000 bales.

DSIR and Fire Research Station Joined hands.

The conclusion is therefore drawn Spontaneous ignition does not occur either in dry or in wet bales of clean cotton.

We have handled several cottons, both Indian and International - from US, Brazil, CIS, African. Pakistan cottons. Some from Uzbekistan have grown in amidst of snow.

The Wet cotton is dangerous due to decolouration of fibres. Yes CIS cottons, one can find bales of Yellow to Brown with a colour grade of upto 83. Yes upto 83.

Ginning poses problem outside 6 to 8 Moisture and it is filtered here itself.

Why one approves wet cotton if it leads him a trade loss?

Spontaneous Heating and Ignition of Wet Cotton Bales are being looked with suspicion over centuries.