With Maruti Suzuki faced with labour unrest and unable to ramp up production at its Manesar facility, the company's dealership has stopped accepting further bookings for its new Swift.

Already the company has more than 90,000 bookings for the new model of its hatchback and has been struggling to service the orders. As against a target of 7,192 cars, only 1,515 have been produced so far, putting pressure on the waiting period.

Bookings had begun in the second week of July and had exceeded 50,000 even before the price was disclosed.

Now, in a desperate bid to cut waiting time (the diesel variant has a wait time of six months and petrol model 3-5 months), Maruti Suzuki has started Swift production at its Gurgaon plant as well.

On Thursday, the first day of production at Gurgaon, it managed to roll out 90 units.

“The company will continue to scout for more trained workers in coming days and ramp up Swift production from the current level of 340 cars per day,” a company official told Business Line .

For some time now, the company has been trying to step up the pace of production without much success. “We had decided to ramp up production from 12,000 cars per month to 17,000. However because of the labour issue, our plans have not really materialised,” Mr. Shashank Srivastava, Chief General Manager (Marketing), Maruti Suzuki India, told Business Line .

Production had come to a halt at the auto major's Manesar plant on August 29 after the company suspended and dismissed 21 employees on charges of sabotaging and alleged quality issues.

“Despite uncertainty in production, there has been negligible cancellation of orders for the new Swift. We are however not taking further orders,” Mr John Paul, Managing Director, Popular Vehicle and Services dealership, said.

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