Tirupur Exporters’ Association (TEA) president, A. Sakthivel has urged the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi to advice the commerce ministry to expedite the negotiation for implementation of Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and initiate a discussion on this line during Mr. Modi’s visit to EU next month.
In a letter to the Prime Minister, Mr. Sakthivel said, “We need level playing field to increase our market share in EU and after implementation of FTA, we are confident that we could double our exports within next two years by penetrating the market share of our competing countries.”
Mr. Sakthivel said the knitwear export hub Tirupur is doing three billion US dollar knitwear export annually, keeping a 20 per cent share of all India garment and knitting exports and out of total exports from Tirupur, 55 per cent of it, about 1.6 billion US dollar worth of garments shipped to European Union.
The EU market is playing a crucial role in garment exports and enhancement of exports to EU will directly help for creation of more employment in domestic market. He said FTA with EU will have a positive impact on the garment exports once the country goes for Zero-and-Zero basic tariff structure. “Moreover, it is the right time for us to have Free Trade Agreement with EU as our major competing countries like China and Bangladesh have been now facing their own problems,” he said.
The EU is a traditional market for country’s garment exporters and out of total garment exports, share of EU is 42 per cent. “We are happy to note that over the period of time business relation with European buyers have improved a lot. Moreover, garment exporting units have also elevated their strength to fulfil the customers’ stringent quality requirement. Being compliances-oriented units, “We are confident that we can edge over our competing countries and increase our market share significantly once Free Trade Agreement is implemented,” Sakthivel added.