SAATHI: EESL to provide powerloom equipment to small units

Ministries of power and textiles today jointly announced a new scheme SAATHI under which state- run EESL will provide energy efficient powerloom equipment to small and medium units at no upfront cost.
"Ministries of power and textiles join hands under new initiative SAATHI (Sustainable and Accelerated Adoption of efficient Textile technologies to Help small Industries)," a Power Ministry statement said.
According to the statement, Energy Efficiency Services Ltd (EESL) will provide energy efficient powerloom equipment to small and medium units.
It said that under this initiative, EESL, a public sector entity under the administrative control of Ministry of Power, would procure energy efficient powerlooms, motors and rapier kits in bulk and provide them to the small and medium powerloom units at no upfront cost.

The SAATHI initiative of the government will be jointly implemented by EESL and the office of the Textile Commissioner on a pan-India basis.
To kick start the implementation, cluster wise demonstration projects and workshops will be organised in key clusters such as Erode, Surat, Ichalkaranji, etc.

The use of these efficient equipment would result in energy and cost savings to the unit owner and he would repay in instalments to EESL over a 4 to 5 year period.
This is the aggregation, bulk procurement and financing model that EESL has successfully deployed in several sectors like LED bulbs, smart meters and electric vehicles.

The unit owner neither has to allocate any upfront capital cost to procure the equipment nor does it have to allocate additional expenditure for repayment as the repayments to EESL are made from the savings that accrue as a result of higher efficiency equipment and cost savings.
The aggregation of demand and bulk procurement will also lead to reduction in capital cost, benefits of which will be passed on to the powerloom units so that their repayment amount and period would reduce.
The powerloom sector in India is predominantly an unorganised sector and has a large number of micro and small units which produce 57 per cent of the total cloth in the country. There are 24.86 lakh powerloom units in India, most of which use obsolete technology.