India exports cloth to Pakistan.

SURAT: In February this year, Pakistan’s opposition leaders had loudly protested against Indian goods like heavy machinery, trucks and buses reaching Afghanistan through Pakistani soil despite Islamabad’s no transit rule for any India-Afghan trade, barring that in dry fruits.

But in Peshawar, considered the gateway to Afghanistan, traders in the busy bylanes of its bustling markets continued to put up signboards stating ‘Indian dress material available’. Shopkeepers here say without the signboards, not many buyers walk in. Because of the ban, Indian textiles reached Pakistan’s markets through the tedious route of first being exported to Afghanistan and then smuggled into Pakistan on horseback.

But the Pakistan government amended its import policy in July, lifting a ban on synthetic polyester fibre from India. The result is a huge surge in demand for Indian textiles with large shipments of Surat textiles being exported from Kandla to Karachi. Surat’s textile units currently have an estimated 80% market share of total Indian textile export to Pakistan.

What this effectively means is behind the burqa, or without it, Pakistani women are draped in Indian-made, Pakistani stitched salwar kameez!

If traders in Peshawar, Karachi and Lahore are smiling, so are textile businessmen in Surat. “We are looking at a vast market of 15 crore people,” says Narayan Agarwal, regional chairman of Synthetic and Rayon Textile Export Promotion Council (SRTEPC).

Pramod Chaudhary, president of the South Gujarat Textile Exporters Association, says about Rs 1,000 crore worth synthetic textile is exported from Surat globally every year, of which 25% is now going directly to Pakistan. “With Pakistani women’s taste in textiles being largely the same as their north Indian counterparts, we see huge potential,” he adds. “The lifting of the ban has saved us of many hassles,” says Surti exporter Raju Arora. “Traders in Pakistan and Afghanistan will no longer have to use the backdoor route through rocky terrain.”

Kamal Pathan, an Afghan trader from a town near Kabul, who was in Surat recently, said, “I lost everything during the Taliban regime but in the last three years, I started importing textiles from India and exporting them to Pakistan. Our business will not be affected even after direct export to Pakistan as, given the duty structures, it is still cheaper to get fabrics through the Afghan route.”

Source : sananews.net