Hosiery textile-park to come up in Bengal

West Bengal is likely to get its first textile park, especially

for the hosiery industry, by the end of next year. The textile park will be set up by the West Bengal Hosiery Association, in collaboration with the state government. This will be on the lines of the existing textile park in Tamil Nadu’s Tirupur.

The park to be set up in Jagdishpur near Howrah, about 20 km from Kolkata will host about 170 small and medium hosiery manufacturing units. Once it is operational, it is expected to generate over 10,000 employment opportunities. The proposed textile park would require a cost of Rs 1 billion and would occupy nearly 100 acres of land. Almost 40 per cent of the investment has already been sanctioned by the Union Government under its Scheme of Integrated Textile Park (SITP).

West Bengal was an important hosiery producing hub until it lost out to Tirupur owing to availability of cheap labour and low manufacturing costs there. At present, there are about 2,500 small and medium hosiery manufacturing units operational in West Bengal, with Rupa, Lux and Amul being some of the well-known brands having nation-wide presence.

Hosiery units in and around Kolkata produce around Rs 20 billion worth of hosiery annually, which is one-fifth of about Rs 100 billion worth of hosiery produced by manufacturers in Tirupur.