Amritsar: Industrialists resent 'one size fits all' approach by successive governments

Tribune News Service

Neeraj Bagga

Amritsar, January 17

Industrialists resented the ‘one size fits all’ approach by successive governments as it is not leading local manufacturing sector in any direction. They said political parties must incorporate trade specific demands in their manifestos.

For instance, hardware units require R&D support, textile-trained artisans and latest technology. The holy city is a hub of diverse industries such as plywood, wire drying, hardware, textile, plastic, rice-shelling, chess and others. Industrialists are of the view that the trend would be eventually replicated at the centre.

Samir Goyal, a nut and bolt manufacturer in the city, said despite being cheaper than the Chinese locally rolled out nails, screws, nuts and bolts were not preferred by domestic customers. It is not possible for the MSME industrialists to upgrade themselves with the quality of domestically available machines and set up their own R&D cells. Political parties must incorporate it in their manifestos to provide one R&D centre in the city to provide the know-how to hardware units to manufacture products accordingly.

“The Union Government was unaware of the basics of MSMEs and their ground work is zero. It is developing its policies for the MSMEs while keeping in view the Maharashtra and Gujarat model, where the technology level is already high in comparison to this part of the country,” he said.

Piara Lal Seth, a shawl manufacturer, said textile was a labour-intensive industry, which requires massive funds, technical support, knowledge of constant upgrading technology across the world, containing input cost on a par with rivals in other states and even overseas to remain in the competition. He opined that leaders of the political parties must incorporate demands and needs of trades in their model of development for the state and city.

According to Sudarshan Wadhwa, a tweed and blazer manufacturer, artisans trained in handling modern machines were highly sought after. He said government-run institutes must upgrade their curricula and machines to train young students, so that they could easily be absorbed in the market.

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