Growth of SITRA
To begin with SITRA had only two Divisions, viz i) Liaison and Statistics and ii) Industrial Psychology. The productivity survey in spinning mills was initiated by SITRA in 1956 before the formation of National Productivity Council by the Government of India.
Work on the technological aspects was started on 13th October 1958 by Dr.Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, the then Vice-President of India. SITRA set up simultaneously two more Divisions namely, Mechanical Processing and Textile Physics (1957). Since then SITRA had added five more Divisions; Textile Engineering (1966), Instrumentation (1975), Knitting (1976), Textile Chemistry (1981), and Labour Research and Training (1982).The other landmarks are the formation of Powerloom Service Centre (1974) under a grant provided by SIMA, Jute- blended yarn spinning mill to produce fine counts and a small-scale unit to produce yarn from pine apple leaf (1994) under the aid from United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Government grants and an ECO testing laboratory (1996) on a special grant from the Ministry of Textiles. SITRA's physical and chemical laboratories are accredited by NABL in accordance with the standard ISO/IEC 17025: 1999 “General Requirements for the competence of Testing and Calibration laboratories”.
SITRA has a full range of sophisticated textile testing instruments and modern machines and has been acknowledged as one of the best-equipped textile research organizations in the country. The member mills are spread over all the corners of the country as well as to seven foreign nations; Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Thailand. | 
