In an interactive meeting with Piyush Goyal, Union Cabinet Minister of Textiles and Darshana Jardosh, Minister of State for Textiles, Manoj Patodia, Chairman, Texprocil urged for the notification the RODTEP rates at the earliest and also maintaining the RoSCTL rates for Made ups under the RODTEP scheme.

He also requested the minister to remove the custom duty on Cotton as the variety of extralong staple branded cotton and contamination free cotton which was mainly imported and not available as yet in India in sufficient commercial quantities.

Patodia highlighted that the Cotton textile sector is one of the few sectors that had achieved a positive growth in 2020-21 despite the pandemic situation.

Patodia pointed out, exports of Cotton textiles (including raw cotton) during this period reached $ 10723 million as against $ 9,799 million in 2019-20 registering a growth of 9.43 per cent.

Patodia also urged Goyal to include the textiles and clothing sector upfront in the ‘pre-negotiation scoping phase’ or any envisaged ‘early harvest ‘ program to overcome the disadvantage faced by the Indian exporters due to duty concessions already granted by UK to competing nations like Bangladesh , Pakistan, Vietnam , Turkey and Sri Lanka.

Similarly he also requested that the Indo- EU FTA should be expedited which will help the Indian exporters to overcome the disadvantages of tariff preferences given to competing countries and create a level playing field .