Cci Incentive Scheme For Clean Cotton Pays Off

An incentive scheme launched by the government-owned Cotton Corporation of India (CCI) has helped cotton ginning and pressing factories engaged by it to produce contamination-free lint (pressed cotton). This has led to an increase in the corporation's sales to private sector mills from 6.68 per cent in 1990-91 to 58.72 per cent in 1996-97.

At a seminar on cotton contamination organised by the Indian Cotton Mills Federation (ICMF) in Bangalore last week, CCI chairman-cum-managing director M B Lal said that the incentive scheme was introduced for the buyers who were interested in contamination-free cotton.

Under this scheme, ginning and pressing factories would install indigenously available additional equipment, and CCI pays incentives for each measure undertaken by the units, Lal said.

 

This has led to export-oriented units depending on CCI for meeting their requirements, he said. He added that one of the steps taken by the corporation to provide clean cotton was to buy kapas (seed cotton), which is transported in cotton cloth bags.

Lal said CCI had found that cotton contamination was not due to old machinery, but due to the attitude of buyers and users who are interested in a cheaper variety, irrespective of the quality. Proper maintenance of machinery and better training of personnel could help in producing cotton on par with global standards, he opined. Listing out various steps undertaken by CCI to improve cotton quality, he said there was great scope for increasing the exports of cotton textiles.

Lal said setting up of conventional type of new ginning and pressing factories with reasonable extra cost would be more useful than modern ginning and pressing factories.

He also said the spinning mills should come forward to reimburse extra cost to factories for providing contamination-free cotton.