Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Minister for Commerce Khurram Dastgir Khan told the Senate Standing Committee on Textile Industry on Thursday that despite the diplomatic tension between Pakistan and India, the trade regime had not been changed by the government.

He was speaking in response to the issue raised by the committee chairman – Senator Mohsin Aziz – that a huge quantity of raw cotton had been stopped at the Karachi port.

However he said that the government had put restriction of importing 500,000 cotton bales in a year via Wagah border but there was not any such restriction on Karachi port.

Aziz urged that the government should instead ban the value added products from the neighbouring country – in a bid to protect the local textile industry.

The meeting was informed that the local textile industry was in a dilapidated condition and its exports were declining due to high prices of gas and electricity, high tariffs on import of input materials for industries, restructuring of loans with banks and revival of sick units.

Chen One group’s Mian Lateef told the committee that due to these certain issues, 40 industries in Khurrianwala industrial estate had shut down production – which resulted in not only a sharp decline in the industrial sector’s exports but also abandoned 400,000 jobs.

Lateef said that if the government resolved the issue of restructuring of bank loans of these industrialists, the units would be revived and it would help in surging of textile exports by at least $3 billion annually with one million employments.

He said that the industrialists did not want their loans to be written off but they want to restructure the loans so that the industrialists could stand on their own feet and revive their industries.

Dastgir said that the industrialists should come up with a mechanism to separate the defaulters and also determine the sustainable and unsustainable industries so that the government could facilitate them easily – as the government was committed to resolve all the genuine issues of the textile industrialists including provision of uninterrupted electricity and gas to the industry.