Dhaka, Bangladesh (BBN) – India has agreed to provide technical assistance for improvement of the textiles and jute sectors in Bangladesh.
The commitment was made at the first meeting of joint working group (JWG) for cooperation in textiles sector between Bangladesh and India held in the capital Dhaka on Feb 27.
“India has committed to provide technical assistance for improvement of our textiles and jute sectors,” a senior official told BBN in Dhaka.
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.
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.
“We’ve agreed to continue the functions of IJSG but modality is yet to be finalised,” the official noted.
About raw cotton import from India, the official said the commerce ministries of both the countries are now working in this contention. “We’ll sign a cotton agreement with India shortly.”
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.
“We want to import 2.0 million bales of raw cotton from India under a special arrangement to avert any unwanted situation,” Feroz Ahmed, secretary general of the Bangladesh Textile Mills Association (BTMA), told BBN.
He also said the BTMA is still prefer business-to-business (B2B) arrangement to buy the raw cotton from Indian exporters with the prices prevails in the global market
Nearly 400 spinning mills are now operating in Bangladesh, and consume around 4.0m bales of raw cotton each year which is imported from India, Africa, CIS (commonwealth of independent states) countries, China, Australia and the United States, according to the BTMA secretary general.
Bangladesh had wanted to sign a cotton purchase agreement with India since the country imposed a temporary ban on its exports in March 2012.
Bangladesh and India signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on cooperation in 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, technical collaboration in development of textiles.
Later, a JWC on textiles was formed as an institutional collaboration mechanism for speedy implementation of the MoU.
The official 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.
BBN/SSR/AD-01Mar14-9:25 am (BST)
