As the government has given permission to only the Industries under the continuous process category and essential goods manufacturing category to function during the night curfews (10 pm to 4 am), several industries in the state have raised concerns over this curfew’s impact on their sector.
The latest sector to highlights their issues with this new restriction is Textiles. Chairman of the Southern India Mills’ Association (SIMA), Ashwin Chandran stated that the textile industry has to work 24 x 7 across the value chain especially in the case of spinning, weaving, knitting, processing and vertically integrated units and the shift timings are normally from 7 am to 3 pm, 3 pm to 11 pm and 11 pm to 7 am.
He mentioned that the textile employee mobility will be normally between 10 p.m and 1 a.m for the third shift employees to report for work and the second shift employees to return home after completing the work at 11 pm.
The night curfew and lockdown on Sundays would affect 2/3rd of the production severely and makeover 75% of textile workers jobless.
Ashwin stated that the industry is taking all care to adopt SOPs and also vaccinating the employees of age 45 years and above on a fast track and therefore, such restrictions are not required for the manufacturing activities.
He stated that most of the textiles and clothing manufacturing segments viz., yarn manufacturing, fabric manufacturing, fabric bleaching / dyeing / printing and finishing involve sequence of processes at each segment and they are continuous in nature.
He appealed to the Government to include spinning, weaving, knitting, processing and vertically integrated textile units under continuous process industry category and permit them to work during the curfew hours and Sundays.