New Delhi: Union Minister of Commerce and Industry, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution and Textiles Piyush Goyal said that we must encourage startups and young scientists in niche areas like Technical Textiles. He said this during a review meeting of the Textile Research Associations (TRA) here recently.

Goyal asked Textile Research Associations (TRA) to submit proposals to the Ministry for any support they require reaching the world class levels of robust state-of-the-art labs, modern machinery, amongst others. The Minister added that the Bureau of Indian Standards could provide necessary support in modernizing the labs of TRAs.

The Minister pointed out the need to assess the projects till their last mile success and added that the projects may be sanctioned accordingly to make them commercially viable. He noted that for medical textiles the research is incomplete without the clinical trials. Therefore, costs associated with clinical trials may also be taken into account while recommending future projects in technical textiles.

The review meeting under the Chairmanship of Union Minister Goyal was attended by Dr VK Saraswat, Member (Science and Technology), NITI Aayog, Prof Ajay K Sood, Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India and representative of 8 TRAs (affiliated bodies under the Ministry of Textile).

Dr V K Saraswat, Member (Science and Technology), NITI Aayog, said that TRAs need to work on taking their research to a commercially viable level and bring the final product to the market. He highlighted that the focus is required on reducing the imports of important products and increasing their indigenous production.

Prof Sood highlighted the importance of having incubation centres in TRAs. He emphasized on the need to research HEPA filters, which has a huge potential in future. He also asked TRAs to identify the products which are mainly imported and urged them to direct their research activities to these products in order to achieve self-sustainability. /BI/