Tamil Nadu textile belt output down as migrants return home to vote

CHENNAI: Yarn spinners, garment makers and finished fabric manufacturers of Tamil Nadu’s western belt have been producing less over the past few weeks as a significant portion of their workforce returned home to cast votes in the parliamentary elections underway, a disruption signalling significant dependence on migrant labour for production.

An internal survey conducted by the Indian Texpreneurs Federation, which has over 500 mills in Coimbatore, Tirupur — the exporters’ hub — and other regions of TN showed a majority of the mills running at a 10-20% loss in capacity utilisation. The survey took into account mills that make up 75 lakh spindles of capacity in the under -two-crore spindle capacity in the state.

The drop accentuates a prevailing shortage in labour, a perennial condition in the western cluster. “For the past two years, worker shortage is continuing in our industry — this is happening even without any new big factories. With a burgeoning service sector absorbing workforce, getting labour for factories has become a challenge. There is a supplydemand mismatch,” said Prabhu Damodharan, convenor of ITF.


“They usually go in batches to visit their families. In a mill of 600 workers, we used to send 25 workers at a time. Compared to the 2014 elections, the migrant labour ratio has increased and its effect has begun to affect production this season,” said Raja M Shanmugham, president of the Tirupur Exporters Association. “In terms of real numbers, their count cannot be less than 2.5 lakh in Tirupur alone,” he estimated.

The drop in production arrives at a time of fragile European market recovery, which has ensured decent order flows to Coimbatore and Tirupur, dubbed Dollar City for its active exports scene. The Tirupur cluster is expected to have crossed Rs 50,000 crore in business, including supply to the domestic market, in the fiscal 2018-19 year. Exports alone should have crossed Rs 26,000 crore, estimated Shanmugham, with targets set for Rs 30,000 crore in the current fiscal.

Migration of low-skilled workers from Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and the Northeastern states to Tamil Nadu’s factories has become a permanent fixture. Entrepreneurs have embraced the influx enthusiastically, building hostels and offering flexible work contracts, ringing in change in a once-unionised industry cluster. Textile mill owners say the high demand for workers, addressed largely by migrants, has had a debilitating effect on unionism in Coimbatore: Ridden with conflicts and strike-calls in its heyday, unionism in the western belt’s textile factories is now plateauing off, say local leaders with CITU in Coimbatore.

“It has been a struggle to sustain existing unions as the nature of labour force has changed drastically. Migrants are here today and the next month in another state. We are unable to sell unions to a floating workforce,” said S Krishnamoorthy, district secretary for CITU in Coimbatore.