The government on Wednesday said a national action plan for the country's toys industry has been prepared with collaboration of 14 central ministries involving need-based interventions for overall development of the sector in 13 identified handicrafts toy clusters.
As part of the initiative to promote the domestic toy industry, a National Toy Fair is proposed to be held between February 27 and March 3, 2021, the textile ministry said.
The ministry said a scheme and a Mega Integrated Textile Region and Apparel (MITRA) Park, in over 1,000 acres of land with state-of-the-art infrastructure, common utilities and R&D lab, are under consideration.
So far, 59 textile parks have been sanctioned under the Scheme for Integrated Textile Parks, out of which 22 have been completed.
The ministry also stated that it is developing an e-commerce platform through Digital India Corporation, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, to provide direct marketing platform to the handicraft artisans.
"In the first phase, the artisans/weavers from 205 handicrafts/handlooms clusters are being selected throughout the country for uploading the handicrafts/handlooms product on portal," the ministry said in its Year-End Review.
During the calendar year 2020, the Cotton Corporation of India (CCI) has made a record procurement of around 151 lakh bales under minimum support price (MSP) operations, around 290 per cent higher as against the procurement of 38.43 lakh bales a year ago, it said.
CCI has disbursed an amount of Rs 39,500 crore to 30 lakh cotton farmers towards procurement of cotton under MSP operations, which is around 265 per cent higher than the disbursement of Rs 10,800 crore in the previous year, the ministry said.
The ministry also highlighted the concerted efforts to achieve self-sufficiency in the manufacturing of personal protective equipment (PPE) kits amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It said, "With development of a new industry valuing Rs 7,000 crore with 1,100 PPE manufacturers producing a peak of 4.5 lakh units per day, India becomes second-largest PPE manufacturer in the world." Prior to March 2020, PPE body coveralls required for use of health professionals, suitable for COVID-19 pandemic were not manufactured in India.
Besides, for promoting silk mark products on e-commerce platforms, the Silk Mark Organisation of India entered into an agreement with Amazon for online promotion of the 100 per cent pure silk products with 'Silk Mark' by the Authorized Users of Silk Mark.
"Further, discussions are also being held with Flipkart, for the online promotion of products of Silk Mark Authorized Users on their platform," stated the ministry.
Elaborating upon other major initiatives for the textile sector during the year, the ministry observed that a National Technical Textiles Mission was approved with a total outlay of Rs 1,480 crore.
The mission will aim at an average growth rate of 15-20 per cent per annum, taking the level of domestic technical textile market size to USD 40-50 billion by 2024.
Moreover, in support of the Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative, necessary steps were taken to manufacture Automatic Reeling Machine (ARM) package indigenously by involving local machinery manufacturing industries at a competitive price challenging the import of ARMs particularly from China, it stated.
The Indian textile sector is the sixth-largest exporter of textiles and apparels in the world. Its share in mercantile exports is 12 per cent and is the second-largest employment generator after agriculture.
