Current information on the situation of our production partners in India
Textile production, which was already restarted in May, is still running at a reduced level. Tirupur the location of most of our industrial production partners in India is not currently considered an infection hot spot.
The overall situation in India is different in various parts of the country. The number of new infections with COVID 19 is still increasing. With a cure rate of almost 70 percent, the number of fatalities has fallen to less than 3 percent. Strict regulations and restrictions on domestic travel help to control and stop the spread of the virus. Indians are learning to live with COVID 19.
“The government has now approved the entry of workers from the north under strict guidelines. We inform workers of all the requirements before they travel. As soon as they arrive here, we conduct a swab test and quarantine the workers for 14 days. The costs of the workers’ travel, a corona test and food during the quarantine are covered by us, 41 employees started work again today after a 14-day quarantine “ says Lilam Reuben, owner, Century Apparels Pvt. Ltd. Tirupur.
In order to prevent asymptomatic persons who may be carriers of the virus from spreading the virus in the workplace, companies continue to implement strict hygiene measures.
Aditya Udani, Kaytee Corporation Pvt. Ltd, Tirupur, reports, “We have a strict protocol to ensure that we keep the virus away from our operations and conduct thorough daily checks on our employees. Since the start of production in mid-May, our factory has no longer had any COVID 19 infections. We are back to a production capacity of over 80%”.
A considerable difficulty which the manufacturing companies and Remei production partners have to master in the current situation is the planning and organization of all production steps to ensure punctual delivery. Still most Indian companies in the bioRe® Sustainable Textiles supply chain from knitting, dyeing, printing to sewing are working with a reduced capacity. This results in supply bottlenecks which have to be bridged.
Another major challenge for the companies is the lack of demand from the Indian domestic market.
“Due to the continuing problems, especially from the domestic market, we expect a decline in sales of 25-30% overall. We are working on rationalizing our work processes to increase productivity and reduce unnecessary costs. This will be a very difficult year for manufacturing companies like ours,” said Aditya Udani, Kaytee Corporation Pvt. Ltd, Tirupur, India.
For its part, Remei was able to place stable orders with its production partners compared to the previous year. The stable relationships with our trade and production partners are extremely valuable in the current situation and enable us and our production partners to maintain cash flow. We would like to thank our trading partners once again for their responsible handling of the changed situation.
There is no direct financial support for companies from the government in India, but it has been announced that loans will be granted at high interest rates.
“Although we have prepared ourselves for an ongoing confrontation with the crisis, we believe that society and government are coping well and hope that we will learn and deal with the situation better and get away with limited damage to society and the economy,” says Christopher Karunakaran, General Manager, Well Knit Industries & Sreeja Hosieries Pvt Ltd., Tirupur.
Detailed information on the current situation of bioRe® organic cotton farmers in India, who are at the beginning of our textile production chain, was published on the BioRe® Platform on August 5th.
An update from August 12th on the corona situation and the current purchase of bioRe® organic cotton in Tanzania can be found here.
