SEZ's, hiking exports and more jobs: Vision for Leather

Chennai, June 6 (UNI) Setting up SEZ's, increasing leather exports to seven billion dollars and creating one million additional jobs are the high points of the Vision Document for the leather Industry released here today.

The document prepared by Council for Leather Exports (CLE) was presented to Union Minister of State for Commerce Jairam Ramesh at an interactive meeting with members of leather, trade and industry here.

Later talking to reporters, Mr Ramesh said the document was a five year perspective plan for the leather industry and exports.

Leather exports from India were 2.5 billion dollars now and the document envisaged increasing it to seven billion dollars.

Stating it was not dollars but jobs that were important, he said in the next five years, one million additional jobs would be created in the leather industry, which at present employed about 2.5 million people, mostly women belonging to Scheduled Castes and Minorities.

Asserting the Centre was committed to give highest priority for leather industry because of social importance and vast job potential for the weaker sections, Mr Ramesh said the first major change would be to hike proportionate of footwear exports, which was only one third of total leather exports, as against global rate of two thirds.

'We will increase the proportion of footwear exports to 50 per cent in the next five years from the present one third', he said and added that determined efforts would be made to raise footwear export to United States from 12 per cent to 20-25 per cent in five years.

Footwear export to Europe was 63 per cent.

Further, more focus would be given to products as 90 per cent dootwear exports were men's shoes, while the growth market was for footwear for women and children. The latter would be 'got into' to make a major impact globally.

More UNI GV AA 1535