The ambitious Disha project of the AEPC, targeted to upgrade the Indian garment export industry to internationally accepted standard of compliance on various parameters and basically related to working environment, has over the years taken a lot of criticism from the industry and also from implementing agencies. This has led to many revisions in the project and now with Puneet Kumar, Secretary General, AEPC personally supervising the project, expectations are again building up for a common compliance code that will be acceptable to all buyers.
There is no doubt that the DG is very determined to give new direction to Disha and at the recently concluded IIGF, companies who have been certified by Disha were encouraged to put up boards declaring the same to gauge the reaction of the international buyers. “We are telling them that if you have already achieved the capacity building, as visualized by Disha, then flaunt it… After all the whole purpose of Disha is to create a more responsible environment in favour of women employees to avoid child labour, to ensure that there are enough measures to take care from fire hazard, electricity hazard, providing better facilities for the workers, besides many other objectives that are enshrined in the DISHA document. We already have a list of 250 factories which are at different stages of achieving the capacity building and more factories are likely to follow after realizing that this recognition is being noticed by international buyers,” reasons Puneet Kumar.
Many of the exporters who have undergone the Disha program have found value. “Though our factory was fulfilling all the norms, still we got to know many new things through Disha in its 6 months period. We were lacking on some fronts and it helped us to remove that. The biggest difference we noticed was their friendly way of working, guiding us through the process unlike other third-party audit agencies sent by buyers. It motivated us, so it is a good initiative,” says Shishir Kapoor, Director, MLK Exports, Lucknow.
Though Disha is still at an upstart stage, the team is upbeat that once the work being done at factories is seen by the buyers, the recognition will automatically follow. “What we are saying to the buyer is that we are giving this certification with full responsibility and they are free to check or cross check with their own systems and mechanisms using their agencies and governmental organizations whomsoever they are deploying to check our standards. I am very sure that in the times to come they will find that our certification is given after satisfactory compliance only and there is nothing left to chance, nothing left unaddressed then they would slowly start accepting our certification and it would achieve the international recognition,” says Puneet Kumar.
However, there is still a lot to be done before the match is perfect. “To the best of my knowledge Disha compliance is not being accepted by buyers and they are insisting for their own auditing. We had gone in for Disha with the hope of uniformity and acceptability by buyers, as each buyer asks for different certifications, audits. The benefit we did get from Disha was awareness and involvement of shop floor level by various champion teams from every department,” says Gopal Singh, Head-CSR, Sargam Exports, Gurgaon. Adding to the thought Dinesh Goyal, Director, Traditional Gallery, Jaipur says, “We already had an ISO certification but we went in for Disha just because of its specialization in apparel industry. It improved our awareness, ways of working especially in material movement. Yet, the AEPC needs to be more proactive and even after a year of its completion we are waiting for our certification which is unfair as we have no documentation to show in the name of Disha.”
Reacting to the need to be more proactive, the team at Disha is now reaching out to the industry under its new Coordinator, Mona Gupta encouraging them to give enough opportunity to the facilitators of the project to know them, educate them, dress up their system and make them fully aware of all this compliance regulations. “Increasingly global buyers are being very cautious of compliance, so exporters are addressing these needs even though it has costs. We are basically telling the exporters that Disha is a voluntary programme to help capacity building, we cannot enforce it on any particular factory, it is just like telling people that they should understand the implications of law and follow it. Our job as a responsible export promotion council is to promote more and more companies to follow the compliances, because when you are compliant you get more business,” concludes Puneet Kumar.
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