Factbox: Indian cotton yarn's journey, from knitting to packing
11/02/2022 02:00
By Krishna N. Das
HINDUPUR, India, Feb 11 (Reuters) - India is hoping its
labour-intensive textiles and apparel (T&A) companies will help
it address a jobs crisis, and has promised to pump about $2
billion into the industry over the next few years to generate
more than 1 million jobs. urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL4N2U410Z
About a third of the money would go into setting up seven
so-called Mega Integrated Textile Region and Apparel parks, each
spanning across more than 1,000 acres (404 hectares).
The government says India's T&A companies, small and large,
are too scattered across the vast country, which delays delivery
and raises cost.
At a Dubai expo late last year, a senior Indian textile
ministry official https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcdvmfYEk1I
laid out the typical cotton-to-clothes network in India:
Cotton is grown in states such as Telangana and Andhra
Pradesh in the south; then goes further south to Tamil Nadu for
spinning into yarn; weaving happens in the western states of
Gujarat and Maharashtra; processing occurs in neighbouring
Rajasthan; from where it goes to the national capital region of
Delhi in the north, Bengaluru in the south and Kolkata in the
east for garment-making.
Cotton produced by a farmer in Telangana can move thousands
of kilometres to become a T-shirt, compared with barely a few
hundred kilometres in Bangladesh, though the latter is reliant
on cotton produced in India and China.
Some Indian textiles industry officials say many companies
have now moved their factories closer to raw materials.
Here is an illustration of how cotton is turned into shirts
in India, using the example of Texport Industries, whose buyers
include Walmart Inc WMT.N , Kohl's Corp KSS.N , Tommy Hilfiger
and Nautica.
YARN
Texport, whose main factories are in the town of Hindupur in
Andhra Pradesh, sources white or dyed yarn from suppliers in
Gujarat, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. The supplies come from
factories located anywhere between 350 km (215 miles) and 1,450
km (900 miles) away.
FABRIC
the Hindupur factories use South Korean knitting machines to
produce rolls of fabric from yarn to make products such as
T-shirts for Tommy Hilfiger.
The factories buy woven fabrics to make shirts and tops for
Kohl's from firms spread across various textile clusters in
Tamil Nadu, located within a radius of 350 km.
GARMENTS
The in-house and third-party fabric rolls then move to giant
plants nearby where thousands of people work machines, scissors
and hot irons in eight-hour shifts.
The dyed and washed rolls are unrolled using machines. Plain
ones are shaped by machines in batches, checked ones using
scissors.
An army of mostly women seamstresses then stitch them into
T-shirts, shirts, tops and kids' jumpsuits that are inspected,
washed, dried, pressed, tagged and then packed into cartons to
be trucked to the seaport in Chennai, some 400 km away, before
they are shipped to nearly two dozen countries, mainly the
United States.
(Reporting by Krishna N. Das; Editing by Alex Richardson)
((Krishna.Das@tr.com; https://twitter.com/krishnadas56 ;))