Maruti may shift Manesar production partly to Gurgaon

Maruti Suzuki could soon shift a chunk of its production to Gurgaon as labour troubles continued to cripple production at its Manesar facility,second day in a row. Company insiders said that Maruti Suzuki was keen on starting full production at the earliest in an effort to meet growing demand in the market. Currently,brands like Swift,A Star,SX4 and DZire are manufactured at Manesar.

On Tuesday,the management-worker standoff intensified when the company decided to layoff an additional 28 workers on disciplinary grounds. Out of these workers 16 were permanent while 12 were technicians and temporary in nature. Earlier on Monday the company had suspended 21 workers. What has complicated the matter for Maruti is that it was in the middle of expanding production for its new hatchback Swift at its Manesar unit from around 12,000 units per month to 17,000 units.

Our factory units are flexible and we are looking at the possibility of shifting a part of production to Gurgaon, a company official said. The labour issue at Manesar triggered last week when Maruti Suzuki accused workers for purposely going slow on production and tampering with cars to fail the quality test. While the production target each day is around 1,200 units,the company was achieving only around 500 units per day. This prompted the company to ask its 2,500 workers to sign a good conduct bond before resuming work. A company spokesperson said that Maruti was keen to resume production by evening. 36 workers have agreed to sign the bond and have resumed work, he said. FE