With the government giving permission to industries in the rural area to restart operations, Toyota Kirloskar Motor which is based out of Bidadi, about 30 km away from Bengaluru, has decided to restart production at the earliest.

From May 5, the company has decided to initiate preparatory operations. “These preparatory operations are conducted to provide our workforce with an adequately safe environment to work in, duly prioritising domains like spare parts supply as that is an important requirement from the markets where certain customer service activity has already started,” Naveen Soni, Senior Vice-President, Sales & Services, Toyota Kirloskar Motor, said in a statement.

He said the company has developed certain crucial changes in guidelines for enhanced safe operations in all areas of work which would mean that the first few days will be spent on training its members on the new guidelines as well as ensuring safe materials and working environment. “Hence, operations at our plant will resume in a phased manner, most importantly keeping in mind the needs of ‘social distancing’ and sanitisation.

“The challenge that lies ahead of us is the fact that for the auto sector to start production, it is necessary that our entire value chain starts operating. Our value chain consists not only of our suppliers but our dealers as well who are based in different parts of the country including cities that are still under severe lockdown,” Soni said.

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