Less than a week after the Central government announced radical changes in the labour laws and offered a Rs 6,000 crores package to the garments sector as many as 38 garment exporters including 13 small and medium enterprises with a turnover of under Rs 5 crore each have pledged to hire 37,720 more people and invest Rs 710 crores over one to three years, according to a list prepared by the Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC) and exporters.

Sudhir Dhingra, Chairman, Orient Craft, has said his company will add 4,000 jobs to its existing workforce of 32,000 over the next three years. He also added that apart from replacing a small unit in Noida with a bigger one, his outfit will set up one more facility in the city. Another exporter Richa Global said that the company will add 3,000 people within a year to its existing employee base of 11,000 people. Texport chairman, Virender Uppal says his company intends to hire 4,500 people over the next three years. This, he said would result in a sharp increase over the current workforce of 1,000 people.

The number of exporters willing to create jobs is rising, as many of them are waiting to go through fine prints of the policy so as to get to the bottom of the package announced, according says Ashok G Rajani, the chairman of AEPC. Also the chairman of Midas Touch Exports, Rajani has pledged to invest Rs 75 crores and hire 650 people in response to the package. This is important, as roughly 80 per cent of the labour-intensive garment sector is dominated by small-scale industries. Overall, the companies have pledged to hire people in the range of 50-4,500.

At present, close to 32 million people are employed in the textiles and garments sector which is the largest job provider after agriculture and accounts for roughly 15 per cent of the country’s exports. The country’s textile and garment exports stood almost flat at $40 billion in the last fiscal with clothing accounting for $17 billion.