AEPC’s Disha: Stakeholders forum for the apparel industry

The Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC) under

the Ministry of Textiles has started the formation of stakeholder forum. The aim is to integrate perspectives, voices and concerns as well as seek assistance and contributions of various players in the apparel industry towards developing strategies to improve India’s image as an ethical sourcing destination. The stakeholders forum will address the challenges of apparel exporters and provide time-honored, focused and need-based solutions/assistance.

Consultations included participants from international organizations, NGOs, trade unions, third party accreditation agencies, multi stakeholder institutions, brands, retailers and buying houses. In fact, all of them gave relevant inputs during discussion. The meeting was chaired by V Srinivas, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Textiles. And chairman AEPC, A Sakthivel addressed the stakeholders.

Addressing the meeting Sakthivel said, “Disha is an advisory body to help small scale exporters as they need a lot of guidance and help to grow. I am happy that so many people and bodies have responded positively to it. It will help in building a quality consensus and everyone will benefit from it.”

The program includes issues pertaining to child labor, freedom of association, proper wages and much more. The initiative is to make Indian apparel manufacturers achieve competitive advantage and sustainable economic gain by taking responsibility for legal compliance, decent work practices and social justice. The key focus areas on which the consultations progressed were: child labor/trafficked labor, freedom of association, wages and benefits, capacity building and global endorsement. The objectives are to define a common compliance code with the global endorsement; designing systems for assessment, monitoring and evaluation; develop guidelines for implementations; facilitate factory capacity building in terms of core compliance issues; implement, manage and continuously improve the program.