The city’s shoddy yarn industry, said to be the largest in Asia, is still in the dumps as yarn manufacturers struggle to survive after demonetisation forced them to shut shop and lay off workers and GST resulted in demand compression and compounded their misery.
In September, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), in its “Trade and Development Report” 2017, expressed apprehensions about India’s growth and stated that the country’s informal sector had been “badly affected by demonetisation and may take a further hit due to GST”. The optimism that the new tax regime will result in a shift from the informal to the formal in industry has been belied as both the formal and informal components of the formal economy have had to shut shop. According to a Consumer Pyramids household survey by the Centre for the Monitoring of the Indian Economy (CMIE), nearly two million jobs were lost between January and August because of demonetisation. It also estimated that job losses because of the new tax regime could be larger than that caused by demonetisation.
The effect of the downward trend in production continues. Industrial hubs that give employment to lakhs of persons have been all but reduced to ghost towns. The industrial district-city of Panipat in Haryana has been one such casualty.
This story is from the November 24, 2017 edition of FRONTLINE.
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This story is from the November 24, 2017 edition of FRONTLINE.
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