Kolkata|
The Institute of India Foundarymen (IIF), apex of foundry sector in India which had initiated state and national dialogues since last 2 years for growth and policy-intervention including green certification are about to bring it to fruition as per incoming President Anil Vaswani and Ravi Sehgal, Chairman, 65th Indian Foundry Congress & MD Carnation Industries who spoke The Statesman on the sidelines of IIF’s CEO Meet held in city recently.
There is already a coded system in place for factories –none are Red-flagged now and a clean energy marking on products will complete their environmental responsibility bid. Further efforts are afoot to
evaluate possibilities of recycling sand, a key ingredient, that’s become unfit after repeat uses, for alternate industrial usages. Availability of power, which contributes to 15% on expenditure, is still a major issue. They have met unexpected success on worker’s skill development module having to revise intake to 2,500 from initial target of 1000. NIFT curriculum is set to be modernized and a center each in South and West – zones which comprise 70% of domestic foundry units – are to be operational soon.
In East the foundry factories are dependent on wagon manufacturers while automotive, oil & gas and capital goods are major sources for foundries in rest.
Last year, 4,500 domestic foundry units – 70% SMEs and only 5% large scale ones, produced 10 Million tones chalking up $15 billion (including $ 2.7 Billion in Export castings) in revenues making them third largest behind China and USA in terms of production capacity.