10/29/2023 0 Comments Hammer and anvil constructionIt is the largest exporter of auto components from India. Today, the company produces 20 times what it did before the changes, with a work force just 25 per cent bigger. Offering a generous buyout program, it gradually shed 2,000 blue-collar workers and replaced them with more educated newcomers. Instead of relying on cheap, semi-skilled labour as in the past, it would stress high technology, high capital investment and highly skilled labour. We were the most uncompetitive country with that cheap labour."Īs soon as India started to emerge from its economic isolation with the start of the reform era in 1991, Bharat Forge decided it needed a new business model. "Nothing could be further from the truth. "Politicians said that with our cheap labour we could be competitive in the world," he said in a recent interview in his Pune headquarters. Kalyani had to apply to New Delhi to buy a new machine from overseas, then wait up to three years to get it. Twenty years ago, it was a typical Indian company, labouring under the onerous regime of government regulation called the "licence raj." Mr. But in the more technical, automated industrial processes, "I don't think anyone in the world can beat us."īharat Forge is a case study of how India can compete. China is years ahead, with many times more foreign investment and much better infrastructure. India, he says, can't compete with China as a cheap-labour mass manufacturer. This, says company chairman Baba Kalyani, is India's future. Instead of dirty coveralls, they wear crisp blue shirts marked with the company name. Instead of pushing lengths of steel into the maw of growling machines, they stand at computer screens monitoring the work of the big white machines, imported from Germany and Japan, that forge crankshafts, axle beams and connecting rods for car makers such as Toyota, BMW and Audi. Most of them work in a huge, immaculate plant with polished floors. Today, nine out of 10 of the 4,000 workers are white-collar staff with college degrees. As recently as the mid-1980s, it had 2,600 blue-collar workers at its main factory in Pune, India. That was the way the plant floor looked for years at Bharat Forge, the Indian company that has climbed up the global ranks to become what its boss says is the world's biggest forging concern. Later, forging moved to factories where swarms of workers toiled amid the clamour of the machines that pressed, hammered or rolled bits of metal into usable shapes. The blacksmith with his hammer and anvil did the earliest kind of forging, labouring in the heat and coal dust of his shop. Forging is one of the oldest of the industrial arts - and, in the past, one of the dirtiest.
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