India gets ambitious. About handloom weavers?

India’s new Textiles Minister is pretty ambitious. But those ambitions would be a lot more credible with a bit more realism.

Or do we mean honest thinking?

India, viewed from a worldwide perspective, has been the great disappointment among the countries that could have prospered from the collapse of quotas on European and North American apparel importing in 2005. Instead it’s been about the most sluggish performers in Asia when it comes to garment exporting. China exports about ten times as many garments to Europe,  the US and Japan as India, whose garment exports are less than Vietnam’s or Bangladesh’s, only a bit bigger than Indonesia’s and just 50% greater than Cambodia’s. Cambodia is about a twentieth India’s size.

The country’s new Textile Minster, K.S. Rao, thinks he can change that. He’s said he wants to see garment and textile exports up to $50 bn in the 2013-14 fiscal year, from the $30 bn they managed in 2012-13.

His priority, he says, are  handloom weavers. Because “the artisans must be taken care of”  

Well, maybe: but he’s not going to increase exports by 66% (or even 0.66%) by prioritising handloom weavers. Those “artisans must be taken care of” because they represent a lot of votes: but it’s not votes India’s soaring trade deficit needs, it’s a healthy spurt in India’s exports of fabric and garments. And they include next to nothing handloom weavers make.

He’s actually got other targets in his sights: “red-tapism”, which seems to be holding new factory sites up, what he says is a perverse policy by the country’s finance ministry to make textile and garment businesses borrow at 12-14% when other industries are borrowing at 7% and delays in implementing the country’s Textile Upgradation Fund Scheme (TUFS) which he believes has been approved but has to still come into effect.

There’s a lot more than just that to India’s weal performance in global garment markets, and personally I think Rao’s $50 bn target is hopelessly unrealistic. But if he’s going to lift India’s game, much of his thinking is fine.

Though I wouldn’t bank on handloom works to kick in much of that $20 bn export growth he’s gambling with his career on