Facing a complete shutdown of power supply since the last four days, textile units in Punjab are now reportedly threatening to lay off thousands of workers whose employment and livelihood is connected with the countrys largest industrial sector.
As production across Punjab is halted in all large and medium scale industrial units solely dependent on power supply from Wapda, the situation put serious light on a question that no one dares ask in a country where the textile lobby remains a powerful force. Namely; is this countrys textile industry really sustainable anymore?
And the way things stand right now, the evident answer is no.
With 80 percent of the countrys textile mills located in Punjab, the frequent waves of power supply disruption have brought 20 percent of the textile mills which are dependent solely on energy from independent feeders to the brink of destruction.
Having to pay double the amount of utility bills as compared to mills working on gas dependent captive power plants, power-reliant mills very rightly complain of tariff disparities that make their end product more expensive than the rest.
But on the flipside, life for those reliant on gas supplies is not entirely rosy either. These units are juggling their production according to the gas supply regimen which for now supplies gas to factories for six hours each day, for six days each week. Resultantly, factories running their power supply on natural gas are crippled by low capacity utilisation.
On the face of it, while both segments of the textile sector have been quick to blast the authorities for bad governance, the fact remains that the complacency of the sector itself has also played a large part in bringing on this plight.
Decades of protectionist policies have left the textile sector loathe to innovation and value addition. While other nations have advanced their industries beyond basic textiles, the biggest players in the domestic sector are mostly involved in spinning and weaving, or low-end textiles.
Not only has there been a lack of investments into uptake of productivity-enhancing technology on an industry-wide basis, but by and large things remain caught up in limbo, with a majority of the industry running with the same partially-skilled labour working on obsolete machinery that takes up more work hours to produce low-quality goods at prices that remain uncompetitive in the global context.
Similarly, value addition within the sector remains dismal, with the total share of RMGs and other value-added goods in the textile export bracket remaining more or less the same over the last decade or so.
Lack of research and development in this regard has meant that only the bigger names in the industry are in any position to make use of economies of scale, while the smaller firms continue to struggle.
While it is rightly said that textile is the biggest source of foreign revenue for the country and has massive potential to further raise its contribution; the situation remains a Catch-22.
Given that the textile sector has not managed to become the kind of propagator of economic prosperity that it ought to have become over the last 65 years, it seems that the time has come for both the government and the sector players to realise that it is fast becoming impossible to starve the rest of the countrys industry to appease a sector that is just not growing at the requisite pace.
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