'Bright prospects for Indian dye industry'

Mumbai, Sep 21 (UNI) With dyestuff industry shrinking in developed countries, there is a huge potential for the growth of Indian dye industry, according to Union Chemicals and Petrochemicals secretary Satwant Reddy.

Inaugurating a two-day international conference on Indian dyestuffs industry here today, she said share of the developed countries in the world production of dyes has come down from 65 per cent until few years ago to 50 per cent today. There was, therefore, huge potential for the growth of the Indian dye industry.

Countries like Germany, USA, Japan, Switzerland and the UK account for two-thirds of the world production of dyestuff.

The developed world is not interested in further growth of the dyestuff industries in their countries and would prefer to source their requirements from countries like India, China, Taiwan, Korea and Indonesia, Ms Reddy said.

However, she cautioned that the Indian growth should not be at the cost of environment deterioration and ''we have to meet the environmental and pollution standards norms scruplously''. Some of the small scale industries were closed down for not meeting the prescribed pollution control standards, she pointed out.

The installed capacity of dyestuff units was considerably underutilised owing to the absence of world class plant capacities, use of obsolete equipment and technology, insufficient R&D efforts, lack of market support by way of consortium and absence of diversification and long term product planning, she said.

She advised the domestic dye industry to adapt their plant capacities to meet global demand and environmental standards.

Informing about the steps being taken by the Centre for the dye industry, she said a task force has been constituted to finalise the strategy to face the challenges posed by the proposed European Union legislation REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals). Under the proposed REACH legislation, exporters of chemicals to EU are required to register their products with complete safety data.

UNI KKD MAZ SKB1956