Tirupur, a small town in the state of Tamil Nadu, started off as a market
for raw cotton back in the day, has today become a strong base for the setting
up of cotton ginning factories. In due course, the local economy of this
South-Indian town gave way to hosiery cluster and is today known as the
country’s biggest knitwear cluster accounting to a whopping 90% of the nation’s
total knitwear exports. Let us take a
closer look at what is now known as the ‘Knit City of India’ and rightly so!
While how the development of Tirupur was initiated still remains hazy,
what is intriguing is that it is assumed that it was a web of small to
mid-sized units that gave way to the what stands today as the hub of knitwear
industry. In majority of the cases the weaving of the fabric is done outside
tirupur, while the processing of the fabric, cutting, stitching, packing etc
are done in Tirupur. It is because of
this reason that job works, contracting and outsourcing are highly popular in
this town. More often than not it is due to this reason that textile units set
up their subsidiaries rather than integrated factories. However, this
difficulty seldom creates any hindrance, and the ever-increasing businesses in
this town stand testimony to this fact!
It was almost about three decades ago, that Tirupur emerged as a centre
for ginning cotton yarn. Today Tirupur has not only proven its mettle as the
textile hub of India, but boasts of providing full time employments to more
than 4,00,000 workers with an average monthly salary of Rs. 9,000 each. Not
surprisingly, the town has gained the recognition of being the principal source
not just for knitwear but also for hosiery, casual wear as well as sportswear.
The industrial hub of Tirupur has gained support both from the central as
well as the state governments. In order to support the textile businesses
special industrial parks have been set up. Of the 4 major industrial parks that
are still operational in the town, the Nethaji Apparel Park has the maximum of
53 companies functioning with an overall revenue of Rs.15 Billion from exports.
Some of the most renowned brands of the world including but not limited to
Nike, Adidas, Diesel, Switcher, Ralph Lauren etc. are known to import merchandize
from Tirupur.
As surprising as it may sound, it was the uncanny, raw and personalised
organisational structure of the industry that this industrial hub is striving.
In fact the norms that govern business practices in Tirupur are rather informal
for the sheer scale of business. What makes it more interesting is not a lot of
textile giants have set up shop in this town, which makes up for an export
revenue of an estimated US$ 1 Billion.
While this
city has been the mainstay of Indian garment industry for a while now, it has
faced its share of challenges and problems as well. The biggest problem which
tirupur has faced recently is the closure of T of all dyeing units a few years
ago, for polluting the Noyal river. The units were closed following a court
order. The dyeing units started running in the neighbouring districts of
Namakkal and Salem but soon they closed down too. Dyeing makes up 35 per cent
of the total cost of the finished product so its closure really affected
businesshere. Because of this the dyeing costs have increased exponentially
as their are only few dyeing units in tirupur which have the financial muscle
to install recycling plants to purify the waste. This has resulted in a
substantial loss of business to tiurpur over last few years as business has
moved to Bangladesh because of cost factors.
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