While COVID 19 severely affected companies across all industrial sectors, technical textiles proved to be an outlier by scaling up production of medical personal protective equipment (PPE) kits manifold within couple of months. Webinar, hosted by The Indian Textile Journal (ITJ), highlighted the industry’s success and analysed the future growth opportunities. 

Technical textiles having functional utility find applications in many sectors.  India’s share in the global technical textiles market, which was $ 177 billion in 2018, is about 4 to 5 per cent. The emergence of COVID-19 has brought the world to a standstill. While companies across industries felt the impact of COVID 19, the technical textiles sector, as an exception, rose to the occasion and delivered millions of PPE suits and masks to fight COVID 19 pandemic. 

In this context, the Indian Textile Journal magazine, in association with the Indian Technical Textiles Association (ITTA), organised a webinar - titled “Is Indian technical textiles industry ready for a global play?” - on May 28, 2020. The webinar assessed the strengths and weaknesses of Indian technical textiles industry and highlighted on the new global opportunity in the post-COVID 19 scenario.

Moderated by Avinash Mayekar, Managing Director and CEO of Suvin Advisors, the panelists for the webinar included Dr Anup Rakshit, Executive Director, ITTA; Amit Agarwal, Chairman of CTM Technical Textiles; Pramod Khosla, CMD of Khosla Profil; and Dr Seshadri Ramkumar, Professor, Nonwovens & Advanced Materials Laboratory, Texas Tech University, USA.

Speaking on how the technical textiles industry, along with the government’s active support, met the growing requirement of PPE kits during to the COVID 19 pandemic, Dr Rakshit said that the journey has not been easy. “But now there is good co-ordination between the government bodies and the technical textiles industry.” 

On the challenges faced, Dr Rakshit added, “When the Coronavirus was found in India, there was only one Centre of Excellence for medical textiles, which is in Tamil Nadu. Sending the materials to them for testing was a problem because of the lockdown. In this scenario, laboratories were used to do certain tests. These laboratories used their own quality control and were used for product development purposes. Today there are nine such laboratories in the country. Another problem was how to get these products tested and their standards.”

For India to be successful in the technical textiles segment, Khosla said, “This pandemic has brought in that opportunity where the regular businesses have been affected in a big way. India has been at the forefront in the last two months in the medical textiles segment. Since India is an agriculture-based economy, so agro textiles will play a much larger role and where India can be a good exploiter of products. There is a lot of construction and infrastructure activities going around in the country, so geo textiles may play a role here too. Sky is the limit for the technical textile sector.”

Agarwal of CTM Technical Textiles gave a ballpoint figure on the global technical textiles industry. He said, “The global technical textiles market is around $220 billion, of which $ 60 billion in nonwoven, which is around one-fourth of the overall market. In India, the market is around 5 per cent, whereas China is around 20 per cent. United States and Europe constitute around 50 per cent.”

Increasing applications in areas such as cleaning and conveying industrial equipment, agriculture and horticulture, environmental protection, household furnishing, and PPE among others, serve as the key driver for technical textiles market.

According to Dr Ramkumar, India offers tremendous growth opportunity as its per capita consumption of technical textiles is very low compared to developed countries. “As GDP and the purchasing power parity (PPP) grows demand for technical textiles will also witness corresponding increase. On a conservative estimate, it should grow at 13-15 per cent in coming years,” he added.