"Automotive textiles" is a category, not one story. The umbrella term (mobiltech, in the government's own terminology) covers interior trims, carpets, filters, battery separators, hood liners, belt reinforcement, seat belts, airbags and tyre-reinforcement fabric. Some of these India makes at world-leading scale. Others it still imports heavily. Treating the category as uniformly import-dependent, or uniformly self-sufficient, gets the real picture wrong either way.

Mobiltech — the Ministry of Textiles' own segment label for automotive, rail, aviation and marine technical textiles — was valued at roughly ₹13,595 crore in 2021 and is projected to reach ₹20,165 crore by FY2025-26, a 10.35% CAGR, according to a single trade-press source (Technical Textiles Today) that this blog could not check against official data. That growth tracks the automotive sector directly: passenger and commercial vehicle sales crossed 40 lakh units in FY2023-24, and every one of those vehicles carries seat belts, at least one airbag, tyre-reinforcement fabric, carpeting and cabin filtration — all mobiltech products. Mobiltech isn't a minor corner of technical textiles either: Wazir Advisors' own analysis put it at 22% of India's total technical-textiles market as far back as 2018, already the single largest application segment then.

A separate market-research estimate (Markets&Data/UnivDatos) puts the India mobiltech market at USD 2.32 billion in FY2025, growing to USD 4.57 billion by FY2033 at an 8.84% CAGR — a lower growth rate than the ₹13,595cr→₹20,165cr NTTM-linked figures above (10.35%) on a different currency and timeframe basis. Both are vendor/programme estimates rather than audited figures; treat the growth-rate range (roughly 9-10% CAGR across sources) as the more reliable signal than either single number.

Seat belt webbing is 100% polyester, tightly woven for UV, rot and shrink resistance; airbag fabric is woven even more tightly, engineered for high tensile strength and low gas permeability so the cushion holds pressure for the fraction of a second it needs to. India is, by industry accounts, the fastest-growing seat belt webbing market globally, growing around 9.2% a year. That growth has pulled in the world's major restraint-systems makers: Autoliv (roughly 45% global market share), Joyson Safety Systems and ZF all either supply into India or have localised assembly here — Joyson's India joint venture with the ANAND Group, Joyson ANAND Abhishek Safety Systems, runs plants in Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan making seat belts, airbags and steering systems. On the fabric side specifically, Japan's Toray Industries has run a dedicated airbag-fabric plant at Sarigam in Gujarat since 2017, through a joint venture with local textile firm Kusumgar Corporates (Toray Kusumgar Advanced Textile Pvt Ltd, ₹140 crore paid-up capital) — one of the few India-based facilities actually weaving airbag-grade fabric domestically, rather than importing it for assembly elsewhere in the chain.

Localised assembly is not the same as localised material. The highest-performance fabric layers — the specific weave grades used in airbag cushions and load-limiting seat belt webbing — remain a significant import exposure even where final assembly happens in India, which is the general pattern across mobiltech: domestic consumption has been outpacing domestic production, and India is projected to stay a net importer of mobiltech goods for the next several years.

The market-size and import figures in this table come from one trade-press source (Technical Textiles Today), which dates the ₹6,004 crore import figure to FY2025-26; they could not be checked against Ministry of Textiles or DGCI&S data. The ₹6,004 crore import figure and the 2021 market-size figure were described here as being from the same NTTM-era baseline; the FY2025-26 projection and the ₹2,704 crore export figure are separate, later estimates, and years don't line up precisely across all four numbers — so the table should not be read as "X% of the FY2025-26 market is imported." What the mismatched-year figures still support directly: mobiltech imports run more than double automotive-textile exports (₹6,004cr against ₹2,704cr), a real net deficit on the trade-chapter figures alone, even before accounting for the classification gap described in Section 5. Mobiltech is a meaningfully larger share of India's technical-textile imports (~26%) than automotive textiles are of its technical-textile exports (~10%) — the segment imports more than its share of exports would suggest it should.

Set against seat belts and airbags, tyre cord fabric — the woven nylon or polyester reinforcement layer inside every tyre carcass — runs the opposite direction. SRF is the world's second-largest manufacturer of nylon-6 tyre cord fabric, and India's own tyre-cord-fabric market runs to roughly 180,000 tonnes a year across nylon-6, nylon-66 and polyester grades, produced domestically by SRF and Kordsa's Indian joint venture (Indo Kordsa) among others. This isn't a segment India is trying to build from nothing; it's one where domestic capacity already leads globally.

Tyre cord fabric's domestic strength sits on top of an upstream dependency that doesn't show up if you only look at the finished fabric. Nylon-6 polymer — the chip and granule feedstock spun into nylon-6 yarn, which is then woven into nylon tyre cord fabric — is itself the subject of a live anti-dumping investigation: on 31 December 2025, India's Directorate General of Trade Remedies opened a probe into nylon-6 chip and granule imports from China and Russia, covering the period July 2024 to June 2025, separate from an investigation into nylon filament yarn from China and Vietnam reported as opened in December 2024 (not independently verified).

That's the structural point worth taking from Sections 3 and 4 together: "India makes tyre cord fabric" and "India depends on imported nylon-6" are both true at the same time, at different points in the same supply chain. Import dependency in mobiltech isn't a single number to fix — it moves up and down the chain depending on which processing step you're looking at.

Finished seat belt assemblies and airbags are classified under HSN Chapter 87 (vehicle parts) — seat belt assemblies typically under 8708.21, airbags under 8708.95 — not under a textile HSN chapter, even though the core material in both is a woven technical fabric. That means official "technical textile import" statistics, which are compiled from textile-chapter trade data, likely miss the textile content embedded inside finished safety systems imported as auto parts. The mobiltech import figures in Section 2 capture textile-chapter imports (fabric, webbing rolls, and similar intermediate goods); they do not capture the textile value inside a fully assembled imported seat belt or airbag module, which shows up instead in India's much larger and more frequently discussed vehicle-parts import bill. The real scale of India's automotive-textile import dependency is very likely understated by the numbers this piece was able to source, for exactly this classification reason.

Three overlapping government programmes touch this space, none of them automotive-specific:

None of these three programmes carve out seat belts, airbags or tyre cord fabric by name. The localisation actually happening in the most import-exposed segment — restraint systems — is being driven by the global safety-systems majors' own India joint ventures (Joyson-ANAND being the clearest example), pulled in by rising vehicle production, not by a targeted government scheme aimed specifically at this category. This site's own deep-dive on PM MITRA's site selection and feedstock logic covers the ₹4,445cr/seven-site programme in more depth, including why park siting relative to petrochemical capacity (not just land availability) determines whether "domestic" feedstock actually stays cost-competitive once freight is added back — and gives Mobiltech's own FY2025-26 trade figures with more precision than this piece's: exports $283M, imports $592M, a $309M net deficit that widened as exports fell 21.4% year-on-year, computed from official DGCI&S TradeStat data against that piece's own 314-code segment mapping (a same-methodology proxy, not an official Ministry figure — the Ministry's own published basket uses 207 codes).

What would fix this

• The Ministry of Textiles should publish mobiltech market size, imports and exports for the same financial year, with the HSN codes in its 207-code basket listed as a downloadable file, so readers do not have to set a 2021 baseline against an FY2025-26 export figure.
• DGCI&S should add a memo line to its technical-textile trade statistics showing imports of seat belt assemblies (8708.21) and airbags (8708.95), so the woven fabric inside finished safety systems imported as Chapter 87 auto parts is no longer invisible in the mobiltech import figure.
• The Ministry of Textiles should publish domestic installed capacity for airbag-grade fabric and for seat belt webbing as separate line items, so it is possible to tell how much of the restraint-systems chain is localised in material and not just in assembly.
• The Ministry of Textiles should report National Technical Textiles Mission R&D grants and PLI Textiles approvals by segment, with mobiltech and its sub-products shown separately, so it is checkable whether any of the ₹1,480 crore NTTM outlay or the ₹10,683 crore PLI reaches seat belts, airbags or tyre cord.
• The Ministry of Textiles should mirror its technical-textiles opportunities and challenges report on data.gov.in, so the primary source for NTTM and mobiltech figures remains reachable when texmin.gov.in refuses access, instead of analysts relying on secondary summaries.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

Corrected 25 October 2026. The nylon tyre cord fabric anti-dumping duty dates from 2005, not 2019 (2019 is when the sunset review began; DGTR final findings, 29 October 2020), and the USD 520-1,100 a tonne range is that review’s recommended duty, not a separate nylon tyre yarn case; whether the duty survived after December 2020 is unconfirmed. The nylon-6 chip and granule investigation was initiated on 31 December 2025, not December 2024.