It’s the rapid growth of technical textiles, which now provide essential components in a whole range of applications. Medical transplants, for instance, used to involve only human or animal parts – now it’s the most refined use of textiles that is also being used.
The same components that once went into making your jacket are now helping to provide arteries and aortic heart valves. Carbon fibre and Polyester, braided together, are providing the same properties as human ligament.
Other sectors that are drastically reshaping the industry are geotextiles, involved in engineering projects like reinforcing embankments, and protective clothing, providing suits that block heat and radiation, give stab protection and make bulletproof vests.
According to global manufacturing statistics, production of technical textiles is now growing at four percent a year, while home and clothing textiles is growing at one percent.
It’s a trend that’s well noted by the National Institute of Textile Training Research and Design, known as NITTRAD, in Bangladesh. It now includes the teaching of technical textiles as part of its BSc course in textile engineering, at its campus in Savar, near Dhaka.
The institute has been undergoing a transformation of its own since the operation was handed over by the government to the Bangladesh Textile Mills Association in 2009 as a public-private partnership. The reborn institute, now privately managed, is much better equipped, with the latest high-tech training installations.
Help has come from the Better Work and Standards programme of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation, BEST, funded by the European Union and the Norwegian development agency, Norad. As well as providing equipment for the campus, the programme has been particularly useful in providing international expertise, in the form of tutors and other professionals, and arranging foreign visits for staff.
The principal of NITTRAD, Dr Ayub Nabi Khan, has high ambitions for his new dynamic institute, but faces a daunting task in supplying a market so hungry for textile talent.
“The government has given priority to private enterprise, and this place has become a role model for education, research and training in the textile industry. The problem is we have a huge manpower shortage,“ said Dr Khan.
There are currently 15 universities in Bangladesh with textile departments, and they will double the number of graduates to 6,000 a year within the next three years. Over the same period, the projected need for graduates will reach 65,000. The gap will have to be filled with expensive foreign engineers, so anybody leaving NITTRAD or any of the other training institutions is guaranteed a good job.
Dr Khan is well aware of this challenge facing the country’s textile industry but can see great progress being shown by NITTRAD and is excited by the enormous potential. “We hope to become the biggest exporter of garments in the world,” he said.
For the country to get the most from its overall textile potential it will need to keep up with modern trends such as technical textiles. For this it has the help of one of the leading scientists in the field, Professor Subhash Anand from the University of Bolton in the UK, who lectures at NITTRAD as part of the UNIDO support programme.
“Although at the moment Bangladesh is producing basic textiles, I think in time as education and awareness increases they will be able to produce these kind of products which are now being made in Europe,” he said.
The Bangladeshi textile industry has long had to work to the patterns sent to it from abroad but now it is designing an ambitious one of its own, all about its own future.
