The Indian government has agreed to extend technical cooperation to Bangladesh in the textile and jute sectors."India has committed to provide technical assistance for improvement of our textiles and jute sectors," a senior official told the FE Thursday after the first meeting of the Joint Working Group (JWG) for cooperation in the textiles sector between Bangladesh and India held in Dhaka.
The meeting discussed different issues including import of raw cotton from India and keeping functional the International Jute Study Group (IJSG), established under the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the term of which expires on April 26 this year. At the meeting a 17-member Bangladeshi delegation was led by Shamsul Kibria, joint secretary of the ministry of textiles and jute while Sujit Gulati, joint secretary of the Indian textiles ministry, led the six-member Indian team.
"We've agreed to continue the functions of IJSG but modality is yet to be finalised," the official explained.Talking to the FE, Feroz Ahmed, secretary general of the Bangladesh Textile Mills Association (BTMA), said the BTMA members were interested to import 2.0 million bales of raw cotton from India under a special arrangement to avert any unwanted situation in future. The Indian government earlier promised to supply up to 2.0 million bales of raw cotton to Bangladesh in the 2013-14 cotton season, starting in October, even if a ban was imposed on such commodity export.
"The commerce ministries of both the countries are now working in this contention," the official said while replying to a query relating to the raw cotton import from India. He also said the JWC was now working to develop collaborations between the textile institutions of the two countries such as the skill building institutions, fashion institutes and research institutions.
"We expected that the next meeting of JWG will be held by the end of this calendar year in New Delhi," he noted. Bangladesh and India signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on cooperation in the textiles sector in New Delhi in August 2013 aiming to strengthen bilateral trade relations between the two countries.
The MoU on textiles sector collaboration is a major trade facilitation mechanism and provides for collaboration in various areas such as fashion technology, skill exchange and productivity enhancement; collaboration for upgrading and enhancing production efficiency, management techniques and technical collaboration in development of textiles. Later, a JWC on textiles was formed as an institutional collaboration mechanism for speedy implementation of the MoU.
Source:
The Financial Express
28-02-2014
