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This is an archive article published on August 14, 1998

Svadeshi Mills plans revival

MUMBAI, August 13: It is not easy to give up your job. Especially if you are the single earning member of your house. But hard times call...

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MUMBAI, August 13: It is not easy to give up your job. Especially if you are the single earning member of your house. But hard times call for accepting harsh decisions. Something which Manohar Sitaram Tamhankar, a worker with the Svadeshi Mills has realised. Faced with the choice of being almost jobless in an unviable, overstaffed textile mill where monthly salaries are getting harder to get or leaving to make way for a trimmer, fitter, working mill, he has decided to choose the latter.

Over 600 others, just like Tamhankar, have accepted Voluntary Retirement Scheme as a last ditch effort is being made by the unions and the management to cut the flab off the composite Tata group mill at Sion and put it on its feet again. At present the mill is working to only 25 per cent of its capacity. Machines lie idle and new machines bought years ago gather dust. Workers like Tamhankar who followed his father to the mill and has been working here for 32 years, find it painful to see only two of the eight looms in thespinning department working. “The company gives us work. We do it, however little it may be. We don’t like it, but is there an alternative?” he asks.

Though partly working, the entire staff of 3,000 permanent workers get paid with the management running up a wage bill of Rs 2 crore monthly. Salaries are getting pushed to the next month. A flashpoint was reached early this month when round 70 workers went on a hunger strike pressing for disbursement of their salaries. Two of these workers were found to be sinking after two days of the strike. A hurried intervention of the state government staved off a conflagration. The recognised RMMS union has now obtained an Industrial Court order directing that wages be paid by August 15 and the workers are waiting.

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With chief minister Manohar Joshi slated to visit the mill tomorrow, workers are cautious of hoping too much. “Te yetat, ashwashan detat ani jatat (they come, give assurances and go),” says Digambar Pawar, another mill hand.

Already SvadeshiMills has been registered by the Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR). While this keeps the creditors at bay, (the mill has debts of around Rs 38 crore to Rs 40 crore, most of it in power bills), the management has chalked up plans for a resuscitation. Refusing to give the details, an official of the Forbes Gokak company, the holding company for Svadeshi hinted that the mill would be concentrating on the processing sector – interlinings – which is supposed to be the stronghold of Svadeshi. A phased package of around Rs 50 to Rs 60 crore has been drawn up to be placed before the IDBI, which is the operating agency, for approval.With the company’s land deal with Surela Investments as yet unresolved, and a poor real-estate market adding to the depression, the management claims it is finding it difficult to raise funds for this scheme.

While the management expects to be able to reduce labour by 1,500, the union would not want retrenchment. “We have accepted `rationalisation’,” stressesGovindrao Adik, president of the Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh, “where modernisation will have to follow the VRS. They have to plan out exactly how many meters will have to be processed, how many looms and spindles are needed. None of the labourers want to leave their jobs. But then we cannot accept closure of the mill either,” he adds.

In a textile industry facing continuous recession, it is almost accepted by both the management and the union that the Svadeshi Mills cannot regain its days of glory. “But with a smaller workforce and of course, with modern machines, the processing unit should be able to sustain the mill,” says the official.

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