Pakistan is a leading cotton producing country with textile industry as a major earner of foreign exchange. Bangladesh is not even in the list of cotton producing countries, but has become one of the leading exporters of textile products all over the world exceeding Pakistan. The reason is simple. The Bangladeshi government took the textile sector seriously, worked hard, made contacts with renowned brands of the world and gave tax relief to the investors in textile industry. Bangladesh is now an emerging success story and Pakistani policy makers are held up in red-tape whether to merge textile ministry with commerce ministry or leave it dysfunctional as the situation is right now in the absence of a textile minister.
In a bid to streamline a certain affair, it is the trait of the bureaucracy to make things complex and complicated as much as possible. New textile legislation is under pipeline for the last six years to register all the functioning textile units with the textile ministry to allow them to reap the benefits of textile policy. However, a big hurdle in the eyes of the bureaucracy is incomplete data of the textile units to provide them incentives and strengthen the structure of textile industries. The problem starts due to trust deficit between the government machinery and the business community as the ministry needs additional information such as production data of the textile units to properly implement the textile policy. Frequent raids on factories and industrial units by the government agencies send a wrong message to the local and foreign investors as if doing business is a crime in Pakistan. When businessman is threatened, it leads to capital flight. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif himself is a businessman and can understand the situation better than any other politician.
The proposed textile industry development, promotion and standard Act was aimed at to streamline the textile affairs, but lack of the government interest in this vital sector of the economy is affecting the country’s textile exports. The final draft of the proposed act is pending but how the stakeholders of the industry would react, if the law is passed, can be anybody’s guess. Instead of taking cosmetic steps, the government should facilitate the business community and try to win its trust. Otherwise, the things will never move forward and the country would not be able to achieve the cherished goad of economic development. There is a need to make law to facilitate the business community and not to increase their woes.
