The textiles ministry, which had allocated a sum of Rs 126.76 crore for 2017-18, Rs.83.08 crore has already been spent till now and is planning to seek an additional Rs 33.27 crore for the Power Tex India scheme in the form of supplementary demand for grants, said textile minister Smriti Irani earlier this week in the Rajya Sabha.

The information came in response to a question by R Vaithilingam of AIADMK, who also sought to know if the government is considering to enhance the capital subsidy for powerlooms in the country. Infact, there is no proposal as yet on enhancing the capital subsidy from the present 10% to 30 percent.

The ministry of textiles announced that the yarn bank scheme under Power Tex India was formed with an objective of providing interest free corpus fund to special purpose vehicles or consortiums to enable them to purchase yarn at wholesale rate and give the yarn at a reasonable price to small weavers.

In the period 2017-18, 48 yarn bank proposals and 118 group work shed proposals have been approved. According to the ministry of textiles only two applications for group work sheds are pending.