Knitwear industrialists from Tirupur have been invited to invest in a textile cluster to be formed in UP. As a part of two-day program, Mrityunjay Kumar Narayan, Secretary to UP chief minister, and Sunil Yadav, Assistant Director, Handloom and Textiles, visited garment manufacturing units at Nethaji apparel park in New Tirupur and other places. Ahead of the UP Investors Summit, to be held on February 21-22, the representatives presented their offers to interested industrialists.

Uttar Pradesh is the seventh state to send its representatives. Earlier, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Odisha have sent their representatives to woo the industrialists.

UP’s offers support in capital and machinery investments and transportation expenditures, tax benefits, employee provident fund and employee state insurance were found to be attractive. The UP government team said they have planned to have special purpose vehicle (SPV) and textile parks to establish needed infrastructure, says Shashi Agarwal, joint secretary of Sihma.

Industrialists have been invited to participate in their state’s investors’ summit. They may even have further visits here, if needed. Since Tirupur has attained saturation point in the knitwear business is facing labour shortage and other issues, the industrialists may look for investment options in states like UP. However, industrialists have admitted there is no significant migration of such investments in any of the states which were trying to attract the textile sector investments from Tamil Nadu.

S Govindappan, VP, Sihma says even if those states provide attractive investment offers, it would not be more difficult to get either skilled labour force or raw materials or processing units there. For instance, the Karnataka government was trying to lure industrialists to set up units in an industrial estate in Chamarajanagar district on Tamil Nadu-Karnataka border, there were no takers.