TEXTILES-Dreary Tale

THE outgoing ICMF chief Satish Kumar Modi's scathing criticism of the dismal performance of NTC mills and blaming it on the "inefficiency, functional weakness and deficiencies of the public sector" contrasts sharply with his dubious attempt to explain away the sorry plight of the private sector mills entirely in terms of the hostile environment. Viewed in the context of developments in the textile industry, Modi's plea that the government should "call a halt to the concept of expanding public sector in the fields that could best be served by the private sector" sounds frivolous and altogether irrelevant. The outgoing ICMF chief could not be unaware that the fact that the public sector in the textile industry now accounts for 23.2 per cent of the spindleage and 40.3 per cent of the organised mill sector's total loomage has had nothing to do with the government's philosophy of possessing commanding heights of the economy or imparting a new dimension to the sec- tor by undertaking manufacture of consumer goods. For the government has neither set up mills on its own nor acquired any running mill. The enormous growth of the public sector is the outcome of government intervention when the private sector has tailed totally to run mills economically. Each NIC mill therefore is a monument to the failure of the private sector.