Govt's crucial move towards nursing 5 sectors back to health amid lockdown

The government has sought inputs related to production, labour and logistics from clusters in five key sectors to ascertain expected output if they are made operational within a fortnight and the procedural support required by them, sources said.

These five sectors are textiles, chemicals, electronics, steel and pharmaceutical.

The exercise may be viewed as a crucial move towards nursing the sectors back to health and resurrecting their production and supply capabilities amid the coronavirus-induced nationwide lockdown.

The four-point questionnaire sent through an industry body may also provide critical inputs to the Centre for drawing up a blueprint, entailing a lockdown exit strategy for businesses to limp back to normalcy.

Apart from the expected output value, if a cluster is made operational within 15 days, the Centre has sought responses regarding the procedural support required for facilitating its functioning in terms of raw material sourcing, labour movement, distribution, connectivity to gateways and handling of its cargo at gateways, the sources said.

The questionnaire routed via the industry body also seeks responses on whether the clusters' labour resides or moves within a five km radius and if they can be operated with 70 per cent of the labour supply, amid large-scale migration of labour to their native places, which may impact manufacturing and production in the near future.

Among other issues, it also seeks to know if the cluster has a raw material dependence of more than 50 per cent on other districts or countries, apart from the preferred mode for raw material sourcing (road/rail/air) and markets for the cluster's output.