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Business Notes - DYEING UNITS Getting
After almost seven months of im- passe and uncertainty, around 750 closed dyeing and bleaching units in Tirupur, Tamil Nadu they have finally seen a ray of hope. The newly-elected chief minister, Jayala-lithaa, as promised in her election manifesto, has taken a conscious de-cision to provide these units, catering to the needs of 5,000-odd garment manufacturing units in the textile hub of Tirupur, with an interest-free loan of Z200 crore. This funding will enable these units upgrade their ex-isting effluent treatment processes towards meeting the zero liquid dischage norms as directed by the Madras High Court. The court direc-tive came on 28 January this year following petition filed by non-gov-ernment bodies and farmers against these units for polluting Noyyal. Riv-er flowing through the city.
The state government's move is being seen as a major relief to this textile hub, which lately faced a mas-sive challenge after the court ordered closure of all the dyeing and bleach-ing units for not meeting the zero liquid discharge norms. Ever since the court order, all these units are ly-ing closed, forcing the garment units in the region to get their dyeing and bleaching jobs done from far away places for higher costs.
Falling into place "The new gov¬ernment has certainly lived up to its promises. The help has come at a time when the industry had almost lost all hopes. Now as things are fall¬ing in place, we could continue with our endeavour to increase our share in the global export market," says A. Sakthivel, president, Tirupur Export¬ers' Association. Tirupur annually exports around Z12,000 crore worth knitwear to various overaseas mar¬kets, employing in excess of 5 lakh people. The ongoing closure has ad¬versely impacted 2 lakh jobs in the region. "We are currently in the pro¬cess of preparing an extensive report, detailing the method that we are go¬ing to adopt in our existing effluent
treatment system to make it compli-ant to the prescribed norms. We will be submitting the report in the next couple of weeks and based on that the fund will be released by the state government for the upgradation pur-pose," states S. Nagarajan, president, Tirupur Dyers'Association, which is currently in discussion with various companies, offering effluent treat¬ment solutions.
Out of the 750 dyeing and bleach-ing units situated in the area, 502 units are connected to 20 common effluent treatment plants (cm's), while the re-maining units have their individual plants. It has been decided that one of the two advanced methods - brine water solution method or the nano technology treatment of effluents - will be adopted to ensure zero-liquid discharge. Currently, under the su¬pervision of the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board in one of the CETPs the efficacy of brine water solution meth-od with some modifications is being tried. While critics have expressed doubts about the successful outcome of such methods, Nagarajan is quite opti-mistic. "With certain modifications in the existing systems, we can certainly achieve the goal. We will be upgrad-ing our plants in a phased manner and am hopeful that all our units will be operational by this year end."
Over the years, though Tirupur
has emerged as the biggest knitwear producing region in the country, the industry has been struggling to ad-dress the problem of pollution. In the last few years, the dyeing and bleach-ing units have spent more than Z800 crore in their effluent treatment sys-tems in order to bring down the level of pollution. In 2005, as advised by the Anna University and HT, Chennai, the industry set up a system, where 80 per cent of the water was cleaned through a reverse osmosis system and 15 per cent through multiple evapo¬rators. However, the remaining 5 per cent continued to be a problem. "For bleaching units, it maybe feasible to implement zero discharge norms, but same may not be applicable for dyeing units. However, it is no harm giving an attempt," says Sanjay Jain, vice-president, Federation of Hosiery Manufacturers' Association and joint managing director, IT Ltd which has a spinning unit in Tamil Nadu.
The closure of these units in the region has forced garment manu-facturers, who are already under pressure due to rise in input costs, to send their orders to other centres adding to their overall dyeing and bleaching cost by as much as 25 per cent. Moreover, exporters _,tare also losing orders to other countries since they are unable to meet the stringent delivery schedule. In the last seven months, ever since the closure, the Tirupur exporters along with dyeing and bleaching units have lost to the tune of around Z1,400 crore and it is estimated that this may bring down their overall exports by almost 30 per cent during the current fiscal.
• AHRIND CMPIA
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