Madhya Pradesh has the largest forest area and wood production capacity in the country, yet there is not a single ISI mark industry for making furniture, block boards and there are only 8 BIS licensed industries in this region said, Vice President, Chambers of Commerce and Industry Himanshu Khare.
In an information, he told that there are more than twenty thousand MSME registered furniture manufacturing industries in the country, in which 96 percent are micro, 3.7 percent small and 0.3 percent medium enterprise units.
He told that there are 643 micro, 16 small and 3 medium enterprises in the state which manufacture furniture from wood.
According to Himanshu Khare, the office furniture market is growing at the rate of 20 percent every year. He said that at present, many schemes of cluster establishment are being run by the government, but furniture cluster has not been established in Jabalpur till date.
Lack of value addition federation working committee member and working president of Jabalpur Chamber of Commerce, Prem Dubey said on this occasion that Jabalpur district and division are rich in forest area and every year valuable wood worth crores of rupees is sent out of Jabalpur and the state.
He said that government has announced the establishment of furniture cluster in Indore, there is a need for such cluster in Jabalpur also.
Federation working committee members Ashok Kapoor, Rajiv Agarwal, Arun Pawar, and Amarpreet Chhabra, Shashikant Pandey, etc. demanded from State MSME Minister Omprakash Sakhlecha that Jabalpur should have state-of-the-art furniture cluster, latest technology equipped, common facility Pave the way for the establishment of the center so that the timber traders in and around Jabalpur can give a new direction to their ancestral work.