Just after the independence of Bangladesh, it was already suffering from poverty and no one at that time can ever thought that this country can become the economic power house of South – East Asia. All thanks to the Textile Industries of this country which is contributing a lion’s share on our country’s economic growth.
Textile Industries started it’s journey by contributing 6 billon dollars on our country’s economy and now about 36 billion dollar is being earned which about 84% of the foreign currency earned. All the credit goes to the RMG sector of the country which is hugely depended on the workers, raw materials and the amount of consumption. It has a huge popularity of it’s RMG products. The ready made garments is very much popular in the countries like America, Canada, Germany and many other European countries.
Let’s take a look through a pie chart
But an unlikely enemy of the world named covid-19 has not only put human health on risk but also has hit the world economy badly. Just like the other big developed countries Bangladesh is also suffering from economic crisis. As the lockdown was served the workers of the RMG sector has stopped working and led the possibilities of losing jobs for the workers. Besides the amount of consumption has decreased also as the European countries are the maximum among the numbers and they are cancelling their orders. Another reason that can be behold behind their cancellation is much time consumption and insufficient raw materials.
The global supply chain is closed. Generally, Bangladesh bring maximum of the raw materials from China. The chemicals for dying are bought from China, again the woven cloths, buttons, yarn for finishing are bought from China. So, it is almost impossible for us to do anything.
But we can make our future for textile more glorious if we can get through some difficulties and pave the way of opportunities. The facts that we can go through are described below :
(i) First of all the internal problems have to be solved like, getting the necessary materials on time from the part. Not like other countries, the part’s of our country had to go through a huge passage of time which makes the date line critical. The investor’s also had to go through many formalities which makes it much harder for them. So, if the government can take a special step to release the materials early and make it easy for the investors incase of the formalities we can have huge amount of work and complete the orders in time which will eventually led us to more profit.
(ii) Another problem that we have gone through earlier that is self-reliance. Our textile sector is roughly self-reliant. The raw materials and the chemicals are bought from China. As a result huge amount of money is slipping from our hand.
Every year we are exporting about = 2440 crore dollar
Importing necessary materials about = 1789 crore dollar
- So, expenditure is very high.
Income = 2440 crore dollar
Expenditure = (-) 1789 crore dollar
Profit = 651 crore dollar
*So, the expenditure is = 1789/2440 x 100 %
= 73.39%
So, it is time to be self-reliant after an above 30 years of journey for the Textile Industries. If we can become self-reliant then, we can get an aim of getting about 70% profit and the workers can find employment for them.
(iii) Another problem is skilled man power. Every year the industry had to spend about 450 crore taka as salary to pay foreign workers. Moreover, we need about = 71,000 BSE Engineers but we have only only = 20,000 of them. So, the Textile Engineering subjects have to be made common in the Engineering universities in a wide range and make them (students) motivate to take and have higher studies with Textile Engineering.
Bangladesh’s tropical weather make it agricultural based country but very soon we will enter the world of industrialization by holding the hands of Textile Industries.
Name : Ahmad Ali Abrar Mahdi
Batch : 2019
University : KHULNA UNIVERSITY OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY