Testing Times

Domestic textile industry faces shortage of skilled manpower.

- Arbind Gupta

The domestic textile industry is faced with not only the challenges of a skill gap in its existing workforce but also a high level of attrition, which poses a big hurdle to its growth story, going forward. making its observations, a KPMG study, commissioned by national skill development council (NSDC), says that the industry will have to come forward with performance and skill linked incentives to address the issue of high attrition in the sector.

The high attrition level (which exists across the value chain), is prevalent especially in the case of entry level workers. Attrition among small and middle level workers is more than 75 per cent annually, which implies that more or less all the workers in the textile units would change every year. The study views that there are several small and medium sized units where lack of innovation and changes in technology, deter workers from continuing with the same job role. Besides, unwillingness of workers to be recruited as contractual labourers, contributes to significant informal employment in the sector and, therefore, encourages frequent job switches.

“Competition among workers of a specific function (such as weaving machine operators) should be conducted periodically to incentivise workers who deliver high productivity and improved production quality. Awards and recognitions should be offered to support such incentives to address the issues of high attrition. this may also be linked to quarterly performance of workers,” says the report, which has made several recommendations to the industry for effectively facing the qualitative and quantitative problems of manpower.