BANGLADESH: Four BTMC Mills to Restart Operation this Month
DHAKA - Four mills under the state-owned Bangladesh Textile Mills Corporation (BTMC) will start production again from the to create job opportunities for some 10,000 people.
The four mills are Sundarban Textile Mills in Satkhira (main unit and Nilkamol unit), Amin Textile Mills in Chittagong, Darwani Textile Mills in Syedpur and Kurigram Textile Mills, said a source at the BTMC.
The process of evaluation for floating tenders to award the mills has already been completed.
The source further said that at present, there are some 24 units of 20 mills under the control of BTMC, of which three mills are currently in operation.
Of the three mills, Bhalika Woolen Mills in Chittagong is run on rental basis while Rajshahi TextileMills and Bengal Textile Mills on service charge basis.
?Some 6,000 people are now employed in the three mills. Other BTMC mills can be made operative if the private entrepreneurs come forward on service charge basis,? said a senior official of the Corporation.
Talking to UNB, he said that new textile mills were set under the BTMC after 1975 in Kurigram, Magura, Nilphamari and Rangpur to generate employment locally.
?But now it seems that it would be difficult for the Corporation to restart operation in its various mills, which went out of operation due to various reasons - loan liabilities and old machineries.?
He said that the BTMC put forward a proposal to the Jute and Textile Ministry in May this year to handover such inoperative mills through lease, but the proposal was not approved.
After the 1990s, the BTMC mills fell under unfair competition with the mills set up in the private sector having latest technology.
It is expected that if the existing problems can be addressed, the BTMC could play an important role in meeting the domestic demand as well as the demand of the export-oriented RMG sector and thus create employment opportunities for around 25,000 people.
According to the BTMC official, the major problem of BTMC mills is decrease of production capacity as the machineries became too old and dilapidated with the passage of time.
Other problems include reluctance of the parties to run the mills on service charge basis as their contract tenures are not increased from the present two years, hindrance in marketing BTMC-produced cotton yarn due to availability of imported yarn and inability to pay the arrears of utility services of the mills.
Due to frequent losses, the production of the BTMC mills came to a stalemate for lack of working capital. To come out of the situation, the production at the BTMC mills started again in 1997 through service charge system.
According to statistics provided by the Jute and Textile Ministry, the yarn production of BTMC mills fell sharply over the last decade (2000-10) - 14.82 million kg yarn in 2000-01 fiscal to 0.60 million kg in 2009-10 fiscal.
The source said that the current problems at the BTMC could be overcome if the mills are modernized through replacing the old machineries with the latest machineries. New textile mills could be set up with local and foreign joint venture with excess lands and infrastructure available in most of the BTMC mills.
Besides, there is an immediate need to stop entry of smuggled textiles and yarn into the country for protecting the interests of the BTMC mills and other textile mills in the private sector.
The BTMC official, however, opined that the local textile mills could be made competitive with the restructuring of tariff duty on imported yarn.
![]() |
Source: Trading Market • News Courtesy: BharatTextile.com
|