Pakistan 2, India 0; China 1, India 0 That’s what the scorecard would look like if the performance of sporting goods manufacturing clusters of India, Pakistan and China were considered at this year’s FIFA World Cup in Russia. While Pakistan has once again earned the honour of manufacturing the official match ball – Telstar 18 – China has outdone India in supplying footballs to European countries that place bulk orders for promotional purposes. Surprisingly, a new player, Vietnam, has dribbled past India in securing bulk orders.
While India has never earned the distinction of making the official match ball for the world’s biggest football tournament, there has been a drastic fall this time in orders for balls used for associated purposes, said football manufacturers in Jalandhar. According to Tilak Khinder, export director of Rattan Brothers, a maker of sporting goods with over four decades of experience in the industry, his firm manufactured almost 400,000 balls during the previous World Cup, of which 80,000 footballs were ordered by FIFA for promotion and other purposes. This year, Khinder received orders for only 20,000 footballs.
Indian football manufacturers are cramped by lack of capacity, dearth of skilled labour, poor infrastructure and the rupee exchange rate. A new addition is the scaling down of excise and duty refunds after the goods and services tax was introduced a year ago. “After GST, the refund on excise has gone to nil since it stands subsumed in GST, while the refund on customs duty has gone down from 10.5% to a negligible 1%,” said Vikas Gupta, MD of Soccer International, a manufacturer and distributor of sports equipment.