Business

NITI Aayog To Set Up Product Technology Incubation Centre At Tirupur’s NIFT TEA

NITI Aayog has chosen NIFT TEA Knitwear Fashion Institute at Tirupur in Tamil Nadu to set up an incubation centre which will focus on developing product technologies of functional garments, as part of which, it will receive Rs 10 crore for five years.

The institute’s chairman C M N Muruganandan said in a release that out of 3,800 government and private institutions across India which applied, NIFT-TEA is among ten institutions selected for setting up the project in the first round. “The recognition is a great milestone for the institute and adds feathers to the cap of the Tirupur Exporters' Association (TEA)," the release stated.

It has been planned to construct a 10,000 square feet building to establish the incubation centre, which will be called the AIC-IFT-TEA Incubation Centre for Textiles & Apparels, whose facilities will comprise product development, training, conferencing as well as incubation work space.

“Budding entrepreneurs who wish to create start-ups in textiles or apparels could be enrolled and their innovative ideas nurtured," he stated.

He stated that though the Tirupur cluster is becoming prosperous, product diversification and innovative start-up culture for market development is not up to the mark. Presently, garment manufacturers in the cluster struggle to expand their product portfolio beyond the predominant cotton-based garments due to lack of high quality research and development, he stated.

He said that venturing into all-season apparels at affordable costs has become the need of the hour for small and medium scale manufacturers in the Tirupur cluster to survive in a highly priced and quality-driven global apparel market.

Successful entrepreneurs, sectoral experts and industrialists will be invited to the centre to mentor start-ups, while corporates would get opportunities to be associated with the centre for supporting the incubation of start-ups, he stated.

The centre has entered into agreements with textile research associations and industries for better access to technologies and product development, he stated.