Achieving Excellence in Textiles and Clothing Trade in Quota Free Regime - The Role of Human Resources

The textiles and clothing sector involves most unskilled labour-intensive activities, requires minimal training but offers the most employment opportunities as compared to any other manufacturing sector. In the area of international trade, exports from this sector have played a very crucial role in generating employment, even in the early stages of industrialization. Virtually all successful labour-abundant economics including Korea, Taiwan, and more recently China, have experienced the growing employment opportunities in this sector with the increase in exports. Thus, micro and macroeconomic dynamics of human resources in this sector have played a very decisive role right from the top level of designing the policies and setting up industries to down the line of various manufacturing activities up to the level of unskilled workers. In India, this sector is the second largest employer after agriculture. However, in spite of having comparative advantage in production and export of textiles and clothing, her success in global trade has been modest. At present, India accounts for just about 3% of total world's exports of textiles and clothing amounting to about $13 billion only. One of the key reasons cited for India's modest performance in this sector is the presence of quota restrictions in developed countries, more particularly in USA and the European Union. It is predicted that, just within two years of the dismantling of quotas, India's share of textiles and clothing would double to about $26 billion. In view of the new quota free regimes the government has recently released its ‘Vision 2010 Document' for this sector envisaging creation of 15 million new jobs in the textiles sector. This, however, is only possible if the human resources, the main driving force of this sector, take suitable measures in time. In this paper an attempt has been made to describe the new regime that has thrown various opportunities and challenges, analyze the role of human resources at various levels and prescribe suitable strategies enabling the industry to achieve excellence in textiles and clothing trade in the quota free regime