Garment exporters seek 2 lakh workers from UP govt

LUCKNOW: Days after the real estate sector said that it could provide jobs to 1 lakh workers in the sector, readymade garment exporters have requested the government for 2 lakh workers, citing the shortage of labour as the prime reason for the inability of manufacturing and export units to start work.
In a letter to principal secretary MSME, Navneet Sehgal, the president of the Noida Apparel Export Cluster (NAEC), Lalit Thukral, has said that while they have received permission to operate, shortage of labour is proving to be a huge problem.
“You are aware that due to the spread of the current Covid-19 epidemic, the operation and production of readymade garments units had stopped completely…the readymade garments units in Noida are unable to resume the operations because of absence of manpower, despite government orders allowing restarting of the production units. We are facing a severe problem of shortage of workers/manpower due to the migration to their native places,” Thukral has written.
The association has said that they immediately need 2 lakh tailors and supporting hands to be able to restart work, 3 lakh in the next quarter which may even be increased to 4 lakh soon after as work picks up.
Officials in the UP government said that a comprehensive list of migrant workers who had returned to the state during the lockdown had been prepared, detailing their skill sets. As per that, the names and contact details of everyone registered as tailors or in allied works would be shared with the cluster so that they could contact them directly as per their demands.
The Noida apparel cluster employs about 10 lakh persons in its approximately 3,000 readymade garments production and export units. Its annual export is about Rs 18-20 crore. However, the entire production facility stopped during the lockdown, leading to losses worth several crores. The industry was later granted special permission to operate units as they continued to get orders from stores in the US and Europe.