Firms working at 30% capacity in Jalandhar

JALANDHAR:Even as the state government has been holding business summits and offshore industrial meets to encourage investment in the state, at least 10 per cent of the local manufacturers have had to shut down operation in the past two years due to market slowdown and no government help.

Deepkamal Kaur

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, August 30

Even as the state government has been holding business summits and offshore industrial meets to encourage investment in the state, at least 10 per cent of the local manufacturers have had to shut down operation in the past two years due to market slowdown and no government help.

President of the Jalandhar Focal Point Extension Association Narinder Singh Sagoo said, "There has been a long spell of market slowdown. The businessmen, who took some loans to tide over the situation, got further burdened. They were under an illusion of getting some relief from the financial institutions and the government. But this did not come. Such companies got mired in big liabilities."

Sagoo said that even the remaining units here were running at just 30 per cent of their capacity.

Having a roaring business with monopoly in the region in the specialised business of bomb-shell manufacturing, Krishna Engineering Works has completely shut down.

A prominent manufacturing company — which had an annual turnover if Rs 100 crore and 800 employees enrolled till about two years back — is in the doldrums with the Punjab State Industrial Development Corporation (PSIDC) and banks locking up the two factories of the company and announcing an auction of the property to recover the liabilities.

The much-hyped potato processing plant that came up at Partabpura village in Jalandhar about seven years back too has been finding the going tough.

Mandip Singh of Satnam Farms said, "The subsidies for the food processing industry have been in name only. I have even met Union Minister for Food Processing Harsimrat Badal in this regard but to no avail. With little working capital, I have not been able to run the plant beyond 30 per cent capacity despite good demand for chips and flakes that I have been manufacturing."

Various valve and pipe-fitting industries too have met with a similar fate. While there were about 500 pipe-fitting units in and around Jalandhar in 2004, just about 10 per cent of them are barely surviving due to the alternative plastic fittings available in the market.