Textile conglomerate, Arvind Ltd, has inked memorandum of understanding (MoU) worth ₹3,000 crore with the Gujarat Government, across group verticals. The sum will be invested in the company's textiles, engineering and real estate verticals in Ahmedabad.
"These investments will be executed over the next four years even as we will continue to keep manufacturing in Ahmedabad," said Kulin Lalbhai, Executive Director at Arvind Ltd. "We plan to scale up our technical textiles segment in Arvind Ltd, and focus on real estate development in Ahmedabad."
The investments come even as economists and experts have been exhorting India to move beyond manufacturing and focus on R&D, engineering and design in order to capitalise on the world's China + 1 approach. Kulin agrees, with a rider.
"India needs to do more tech and R&D-driven manufacturing," he said, "But the main challenge for us is to get people out of agriculture and into manufacturing. However, we need to step up as the world moves away from China."
One way of doing that is to capitalise on textile exports: "We already have 5% of the world's textile and apparel trade," he said, "Doubling this will mean $5 billion in exports." However, getting to compete with China, according to the Arvind Ltd director could be more of a question of scale than expertise. "India needs to scale up garmenting, and FTAs will play a key role in this," he said.
Praising Gujarat's industrial policy, Kulin said it was a benchmark for other states to possibly follow, especially on the policy consistency front. "MOUs in renewables or conventional manufacturing is a tribute to the state's policy consistency," he added.
Signalling that private capital expenditure could well be an opportunity that is just ahead, Kulin evinced full faith in growth prospects exceeding 7%. "The time has come for a lot of elements to align and bring investment in," he said. "There's no reason why India can't grow at greater than 7%."
(Edited by : Asmita Pant)
