A leg-up for tanners

The government yesterday permitted five local tanneries to export wet blue leather for one year as a measure to create a demand for rawhide in the domestic market during Eid-ul-Azha, the peak season for the availability of leather.

The tanneries have to submit applications in this regard to the commerce ministry.

Wet blue leather refers to chrome-tanned leather, which is neither dried, dyed nor finished. It has to undergo another processing to be converted to usable hides for manufacturing goods such as shoes and bags or for export.

When going for the export, the five will have to abide by Export Policy 2018-21, said the ministry's permission letters.

Initially, one crore square feet would be allowed to be exported, meaning each tannery has been allocated a quota of 20 lakh square feet for the first time.

Once this quota is reached through shipments, the businesses will have to submit necessary documents to government offices concerned and then renew their permissions if they wish to export more.

The permission for the initial amount is valid up to June 30 next year. It can be revoked at any time, said the ministry in a statement.

The government allowed the export to prevent a recurrence of the discarding of the valuable rawhide by citizens who sacrificed animals over the last two years as they deemd the prices offered by seasonal traders to be too low.

In a domino effect, the seasonal traders themselves had not received adequate funds in advance from rawhide merchants, who in turn blamed tanners for not clearing a significant portion of arrears.

The tanners reasoned that their processing plants at the newly established Savar Tannery Industrial Estate (STIE) had not become operational following the shift in April 2017 after nearly five decades spent at the leather business hub of Hazaribagh.

The discarding of rawhide en masses could recur this Eid too, said some tanners, explaining that banks had not yet provided them sufficient loans which could be passed down along the supply chain.