Kota was once a prosperous industrial hub. Now it has just 1 factory left — exam coaching

Jobs as an election issue has deep resonance in Kota, where serial industry closures over the past decades have spawned an army of jobless.

The closed JK factory site in Kota which once employed close to 5,000 people | Kritika Sharma | ThePrint

Kota: It’s a biting irony that industry lies in tatters in a city renowned for grooming engineers: In Kota, Rajasthan, the nationwide concerns about jobs have found added resonance this Lok Sabha election season amid deep local resentment over the loss of opportunities they once had.

Kota, a city of 10 lakh people (Census 2011), had a robust industrial base long before it became a hub of engineering and medical coaching.

The skeletons of its past are best seen in a colony for employees built by Instrumentation Limited (IL), a government company that manufactured equipment for various sectors like power, steel, chemical, textile, space, oil and gas, and went bust in 2017.

IL (Instrumentation Limited) township in Kota | Kritika Sharma | ThePrint

Once a sprawling neighbourhood with greenery, peacocks, well-built houses, a community centre, a school, a cinema hall and a temple, all within a 250-acre compound, it is today a ghost town.

Persistent losses sounded the death knell for the company, with its closure leaving hundreds jobless.

Thousands of others lost their jobs when the JK Group, which had around seven local units manufacturing tyres and fibres and employed roughly 5,000 people, shut down over two decades ago, again on account of financial distress. Around five years ago, the Samtel Group, which manufactured TV screens, shut shop in the city.

“All that people see about Kota today is coaching, that’s all, but the city used to be much more than that,” said Rajat Khanna of Hum Log, an NGO fighting for the city’s lost glory.

“First of all, it’s an extremely fertile, agriculturally-rich land, well watered, which made big industries want to invest here. But with the decline of JK, Oriental Power Cables, Rajasthan Metals, Samtel and others, industries have almost vanished from here,” he added.

Decline of an industrial hub

At the peak of its industrial heyday, Kota was known as the Kanpur of central India, in deference to the Uttar Pradesh city famed for its leather and textile industries. Residents remember the days with no small amount of nostalgia. “A JK job was considered to be better than even a government job in Kota,” said Mahender Singh Neigh, the president of a trade union for former JK employees.

“It was an internal family dispute that led to the shutdown of JK and a large number of people lost their jobs overnight,” he added.

When the company ceased local operations, employees were reportedly owed around Rs 43.69 crore in wages and emoluments.

For years after JK closed down, efforts were underway to get things started again. In 2002, a resurgence seemed tantalisingly close, but the plan has been hanging fire on account of red tape, say former employees.

“After JK, another company called Arafat Group tried to set up a factory in its place, but [the plan] has been stuck in various government clearances for many years,” said Neigh. “Had a new group set up a factory, there would have been new jobs for locals,” he added.

It was just years before JK shut shop that IL’s troubles began, as India opened its doors to liberalisation.

Starting 1992, a year after then finance minister Manmohan Singh announced the landmark reform in his budget, the company started incurring losses as most of its clients started importing material at cheaper rates.

In 2009, as losses continued to mount, the company was handed over to the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR), the now-defunct quasi-judicial government agency that tackled sick industries.

The BIFR suggested a revival plan to the Union Ministry of Finance: Getting a Rs 30-crore loan from PSU Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), in exchange for which IL would manufacture goods for them, and giving voluntary retirement to some of the employees, for which it had sought Rs 10 crore from the government. However, nothing was approved by the central government and the company had to eventually shut shop in 2017.

“We were living in a well-equipped colony, with all facilities like a school for our children, temple, cinema hall, grocery stores, and one day we were suddenly asked to leave everything and look for a new accommodation,” said Nand Singh Tomar, the president of a trade union for IL employees. Tomar, an engineer, still had time until retirement when he lost his job.

“It was a terrible time,” he added.

Close to 1,500 people, 500 of whom were directly employed with IL, lost their jobs in the shutdown, those associated with the employee association said.

L.C. Gopal, another engineer who was employed with the firm, said government efforts to rehabilitate them had fallen flat.

“After people lost their jobs, the government tried to train some of us in skills under the Prime Minister’s skill development scheme,” he added. “The training was completed but none of us got a job under the scheme.”

Samtel Ltd, which ran two operations in Kota centred on TV screens and gas, had closed down six years before IL, after the owner declared the company was insolvent.

In 2013, The Indian Express reported that former employees of the company, who had then been jobless for over a year, vowed to opt for None of The Above (NOTA) in the assembly election that year.

NOTA, however, doesn’t diminish any candidate’s prospects as it doesn’t weigh on the total tally from which winners are declared.

The workers also held several protests for their wages, which had not been paid when the company abruptly ceased operations.

Seeds of the coaching business

It was like life coming a full circle for Kota: The launch of the coaching industry, which is now reportedly worth over Rs 1,500 crore, is attributed to one of the employees who lost his job around 25 years ago.

V.K. Bansal, the founder of Bansal classes, one of the best-known coaching brands for engineering entrance preparations, set up his first centre around 25 years ago with 10 students.

“He started with a handful of children and followed very strict rules for admissions,” said Rajat Khanna of Hum Log.

“He would only teach those who scored more than 90 per cent in exams and showed potential to do well… The class started doing so well that everyone else in Kota started opening coaching classes and, in the last 10-15 years, Kota has almost become like a factory for coaching classes, sidelining every other industry here,” Khanna added.

It is now largely the only source of employment generation here, with the classes spawning a network of supporting businesses: Hostels, paying guest accommodations, shops, eateries and other hangout spots for the thousands of students who come here every year.

According to locals’ estimates, close to 1.5 lakh students come to Kota city each year to prepare for the IIT and medical entrance examinations.

“Everyone who wants to set up an industry thinks of investing either in real estate to support the existing coaching industry or open another coaching centre,” said Khanna.

Small industry suffering too

Industry experts blame Kota’s fall as a hub on successive governments not building a conducive ecology. Speaking to ThePrint, Govind Ram Meena, the president of the Kota Small Scale Industries Association, said while big industries had already paid the price, the going was becoming tough for smaller players as well.

“Industries are facing a hard time here because the government is not giving a supportive environment to nurture the industrial set-up,” said Meena.

“For small-scale industries, we need to get land on concession to set up industries, roads need to be good, connectivity needs to be good, then government has to provide electricity,” he added.

“All this is the government’s job. Large-scale industries here have already declined over time and the government did not do anything to get new investment in their place,” he said.

The people hit by the industry closures most recently — the IL employees — are still petitioning the government for employment.

The resentment often takes on partisan notes, especially during election time. Though IL shut down while the state was led by a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, locals say the Congress was really to blame since the seeds of distress were sown under its tenure.

“The Congress gave the poison and death occurred during the BJP’s time, so who should be blamed?” said Nand Singh Tomar, the president of the trade union for IL employees.

Meena of the Kota Small Scale Industries Association echoed the charge: The Congress, he said, had done more damage.

Speaking to ThePrint, Rajasthan Pradesh Congress Committee general secretary Pankaj Mehta rejected the charge.

“All these are just false allegations against the Congress,” he said. “Industries closed during BJP rule, how can people blame the Congress government for someone else’s mistakes? The Congress, in fact, started many factories in Kota.”

Meanwhile, Kota’s incumbent MP Om Birla of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who is seeking re-election this year, told ThePrint that he was in the fray with a promise to do all he can to revive local industry.

“I cannot comment on whatever happened in the past, things took their own course, but in the future, if given a chance, I will try to provide all necessary infrastructure to the city to get new industry investment,” he added.

He is up against Congress candidate Ram Narain Meena, who has been fielded by the party to tap the city’s sizeable population of Meenas, a Scheduled Tribe.

One of 25 Lok Sabha seats of Rajasthan, Kota votes in the fourth phase of polls on 29 April.