GST hike in Textiles, Apparel (T&A) a contradiction to the caveat of ‘Vocal4Handmade’?
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15 December 2021, Mumbai:
On December 10, more than 4,000 textile wholesalers, retail shops, producers, and merchants dealing with yarn went on a strike in Erode, Chennai.
The strike was called for by the Erode Cloth Merchants Association against the Finance Ministry’s decision to increase the GST on various kinds of textiles, footwear, and apparel by 7 percent, spiking the erstwhile 5 percent GST to 12 percent, to be effective starting January 1, 2022.
But, how does the textile industry feel about it?
“It is probably a great initiative for the accountant to make it easy by putting a single tax amount on everything that has to do with the textile, from yarn, fabric, to garment accessories, but for the manufacturer and the consumer, it will be way too difficult,” said Sreejith Jeevan, founder and designer at Kerala-based brand Rouka, expressing concern.
“It will not only become expensive to manage or run production but also make it very difficult to market an already labor-intensive product since the costs would go way up”, he added.
Agreed former president of Erode Cloth Merchants Association, P Ravichandran, spoke with indianexpress.com from his shut-down offices. In Erode, where the association functions for the welfare of the different local stakeholders of the textile industry, the distressed weavers, small scale mill owners, local retail shop owners, among others, also pulled down their shutters for a day to protest against the hike.
“There is a huge rise in the price of the cotton yarn, nearly 30-40 percent. Adding to that, this government is proposing to increase the GST by 7 percent. After the pandemic, increase in prices of chemicals for processing, as well as Chinese imports going down, lots of spinning mills went bankrupt in the last two years already,” said Ravichandran, whose association is demanding a restoration of the earlier 5 percent GST rate.
(The news article has not been edited by DFU Publications staff)
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