'Enact law to ban import handloom goods'

BHB Chairman Mohammad Akram Hossain told BSS yesterday that if the government enact the law it would support around 8 lakh weavers across the country for better marketing of their products.

Better marketing facilities include facilities for direct access to textile mills for buying yarn, dice and dyes and ban on foreign handloom goods in local market.

Besides, he said, the weavers expect support to the export of handloom products.

The BHB chairman said the weavers want to ensure marketing of their handloom products other than mere support. Handloom is the ancient industrial sector where females are being employed with males in a balanced manner.

Anwar said the BHB sent a copy of "Indian Handloom Act" with a proposal to the Ministry of Textiles and Jute. The Indian law was imposed in 1985 and it is being used as a useful protection tool for the weavers since then.

The Indian handloom act prohibits entrance of handloom made saree, dhoti, towel, gamcha, bed sheet, bedcover, durret, dress material, barrak blanket, shawl, loi, muffler, pankhi, wollen tweed, chadder, mekhala, phaneek and others in that country.

The marketing of country's handloom products is being affected mostly by the handloom goods coming from the neighbouring countries, said the weavers.

Officials said the volume would have been amounted to hundreds crores taka as different kinds of silk saree, dhoti, punjabi and shawl produced by handlooms are regularly entering the country through legal and illegal means.

Handloom, the largest cottage industry in the country, has a market amount to the tune of Taka 12 hundred crore annually.

But there are no reliable data about the volume of imported handloom goods, said the officials.

Handloom sector which meets about 40 percent of the total domestic demand of cloths also suffers from working capital. The annual demand of working capital of the weavers now stands at around Tk 275 crore.