Hounded by trade unions, entrepreneurs are fleeing Kerala or committing suicide
Basically an agrarian economy, Kerala could never boast of its prowess in industrial and manufacturing sectors. For most youth from the State, places like Chennai, Mumbai, New Delhi and Kolkata were the El Dorado of their dreams where they could get well-paying jobs. The West Asian boom began in the 1960s and since then there has been a heavy rush of Kerala youth to the oil kingdoms in search of greener pastures. Things have undergone a sea change since the 1980s as fortune seekers from other States started entering Kerala since there was a scarcity of casual workers. Most small towns in Kerala play host to hundreds of thousands of migrant labourers, who are respectfully called ‘guest workers’ in Marxist parlance. But now an exodus of a different kind is happening in Kerala, which calls for urgent introspection by the ruling dispensation. The last two months saw more than a dozen entrepreneurs downing their shutters and leaving ‘god’s own country’ either for other States or West Asia. The suffering of Sabu Jacob of the Rs 3,000-crore Kitex Industries, who moved to Telangana because of victimisation and vendetta, has become a warning signal to prospective investors.
More and more entrepreneurs leave Kerala with announcements that they would “never come back”. What actually ails Kerala is ‘trade union terrorism’, according to several entrepreneurs. The trade unions that control head load workers have turned into mafia, insisting that industrialists should obey their diktats without resistance. The local bosses of the trade unions decide who should be employed to unload raw materials and machineries that reach the factories. The fact that the goods and machineries have to be handled skilfully is overlooked. If the management instals robots or cranes to load or unload the materials, the militant workers threaten and even assault the officers. The right to work is being used to hold entrepreneurs to ransom. These developments occur even after the ruling CPI(M) made amendments in its age-old hatred for capitalists with the declaration that private investment is the only way to save the State from the economic abyss to which it has fallen. What party commissars are yet to learn is that only privatisation and ease of doing business can bring development to Kerala. It is the only State in the country that has seen entrepreneurs committing suicide due to Government apathy and militant workers.