The labour intensive Small Scale Industries (SSIs) in the Asia’s leading industrial hub are confronting acute shortage of the workers owing to the Tusu and Makar Sankranti festival. About 80 per cent of the workforce in the industrial area is on leave for celebrating the State’s most popular festival.
“The tendency is such that even if we lure them with fiscal incentives to check the workforce deficit, they won’t listen to us,” said Saurabh Chaudhary, a young entrepreneur.
For at least one week from today, the production in small and medium enterprises will come down to 30 per cent, as most of the labourers went on leave to their native places for celebrating Tusu (a harvest festival) and Makar Sankranti (which falls on January 15).
A section of industrialists had even offered incentives to workers to draw them to work. “We are facing tough times these days. We have launched special incentives to retain the workers during the festival. Even then production gets hampered as there are very few who accepts the incentives,” said Bikash Mukherjee, an industrialist and managing director of Auto Profile, an ancillary unit of Tata Motors.
Officials of Adityapur Small Industries Association (ASIA), a leading industry outfit of Kolhan region said that production loss during the festival is expected to be several crores. “Many small units would remain closed for the next 3-4 days while those units which are open will manage production with skeleton strength,” said Gurudas Ray, vice-president of ASIA.
Notably, the strength of workers in Adityapur industrial area will be around 30,000 including contractual labourers. The number of small, medium and large scale industries would be around 900.
The point is most of the workers are outsiders and during the festival season (Tusu) they visit their families and relatives and stay home for at least, five to seven days at stretch, added the industrialist representative. He also said that it becomes difficult to make alternative arrangement for the short time. “There are few companies whose daily turnover is nearly Rs 10 crore so, one can understand the loss the companies in total make in Adityapur between January and February particularly,” remarked the industrialist.