The Hindu Business Line : Productivity measure will aid economic growth: CII

MR R. SESHASAYEE, President, CII, with Mr Kinjirou Nakano, Advisor, TPM Club India, at the 7th TPM National Conference in Chennai on Tuesday. — Bijoy Ghosh

Advertisement

Chennai Feb. 6 The Indian Government needs to develop a measure of productivity to be able to improve it for economic growth, according to Mr R. Seshasayee, President, Confederation of Indian Industry.

Mr Seshasayee, who is also the Managing Director, Ashok Leyland, addressing a national conference on `Total productivity management', said the CII's agenda is also to ensure that policymakers understand that productivity growth underlies economic growth.

In developed countries, economic growth has been driven by increases in productivity.

The competitiveness of Indian manufacturing industries has improved a lot in the last 10 to 12 years.

Ashok Leyland was producing 40,000 vehicles with 16,000 employees seven years ago. Now it produces nearly one-lakh vehicles with 12,000 workers, marking a huge improvement in the productivity.

But in agriculture and the unorganised sector the same cannot be said. In agriculture, over 70 per cent of the population contributes to just 20 per cent of the GDP. In the unorganised sector, productivity among carpenters, janitors, plumbers and so on was far below that in developed countries, he said.

Increased productivity does not mean loss of jobs. If not on the shop floor, job generation happens through outsourcing and contracting out work and indirectly.

Productivity aids competitiveness, which in turn results in job generation. This has been the experience of the Indian corporate sector, he said.

Of concern was the wide variation in quality conformance. While large industries have addressed quality issues, "the head-to-tail spread is large". As a country we are "not six sigma". We need to take the average up by pushing up those lagging, Mr Seshasayee said.

The industry cannot hope to sustain on low-cost productivity alone because that is an area that is under continuous challenge. It can be India today and Sri Lanka or Vietnam the next, he said.

Innovation is the key. What is needed is a non-linear way for finding solutions to ensure "success is not spirited away", he said.

Mr Uttam Chatterjee, Regional Director - Quality and Manufacturing Excellence, Unilever Asia, said Unilever was rapidly implementing TPM at its 412 manufacturing plants in 367 sites. Over the last few years it has noticed that for every dollar invested in productivity the return was 8-10 dollars.