For more than a decade, Faysal Polymer Industries has been manufacturing various types of water taps. The company’s factory is located in the capital’s Jatrabari area. Rising raw material costs, falling product demand and various other factors had already kept the company from doing satisfactory business for several months. The recent gas crisis has made the situation even more complicated. Without a steady gas supply, the company’s production has fallen by more than 60 percent in recent times.
Md Solayman Parsi, managing director (MD) of Faysal Polymer Industries, said his factory must run a gas furnace continuously to melt brass for making water taps, which requires gas. But gas pressure has been low for the past four to five months, and now it has almost stopped entirely. The factory currently cannot stay operational for more than three to four hours a day.
Solayman Parsi said: “I have to spend 18,000 taka a day just to keep the factory running. To recover that cost, I need to produce 700,000 to 800,000 taka worth of goods a day. But under the current gas crisis, production has fallen to just 300,000 to 400,000 taka. This production shortfall is causing us major financial losses.” The drop in production has also affected employment. A year ago, Faysal Polymer Industries employed 30 workers. Now only 12 remain.
There are roughly 350 small and large factories making water taps like Faysal Polymer Industries in the Jatrabari area. Larger factories have their own brass-melting (casting or smelting) facilities, while smaller entrepreneurs use molds from other casting factories to shape their basic brass tap forms. As a result, the current gas crisis has negatively affected production at nearly every factory in the area.
Small and medium enterprise (SME) entrepreneurs in the light-engineering sector are struggling nationwide because of the ongoing gas and electricity crisis. According to the Bangladesh Engineering Industry Owners’ Association, an organization representing the light-engineering products sector, there are roughly 50,000 light-engineering factories of various sizes nationwide, employing about 650,000 people.
Inquiries at several major light-engineering clusters, including Keraniganj in the capital, Bogura, Narayanganj and Pabna, found that in many places, power is unavailable for more than six to eight hours a day. And where production depends on gas, insufficient line pressure means critical work such as casting and heat treatment must be completely halted.
Business owners say demand for light-engineering products was already declining because of the overall economic situation in the country. With the added gas and electricity problems, simply keeping their businesses afloat has become a challenge. Production has fallen below half at many factories. Under these conditions, paying staff salaries and repaying bank loans has become difficult.
Problems mount outside Dhaka too
SME entrepreneurs in districts around Dhaka have also reported their struggles. For instance, because of load-shedding, production at Agro Machinery Industries Limited, an agricultural equipment manufacturer located in Shalna, Gazipur, has fallen to less than half of normal levels. As a result, the company has been unable to supply goods to buyers according to their orders.
Md Sheikh Sadi, MD of Agro Machinery Industries, said power goes out four to five times a day. Each time it goes out, it doesn’t come back for at least an hour. Work that used to take half an hour now takes half a day.
Sheikh Sadi said: “I’m suffering huge losses. I don’t know how much longer I can keep going like this. I’ve even thought about moving the factory out of Shalna to somewhere else. We’re a small company; banks won’t lend to us. We have to run the business on our own money and by taking on debt. I don’t think we’ll be able to survive like this much longer.”
Complaints of higher electricity bills
Despite not having uninterrupted power, many entrepreneurs say their electricity bills are higher than before. For instance, Brothers Engineering, a plastic dies (mold) manufacturer in the capital’s Keraniganj, said its electricity bill rose by more than 30 percent last month.
Asked how much load-shedding they experience, Brothers Engineering MD Md Mafizul Islam said: “We now need 200 liters of fuel a day to run the generator. Over the past month, generator costs have risen 40 percent and the electricity bill 30 percent, while production has fallen 30 percent. Things have reached a point where we may have to shut the factory down at any time.”
SME Foundation Managing Director (MD) Anwar Hossain Chowdhury said: “Entrepreneurs are constantly telling us about the difficulties they face with gas and electricity. Because of the crisis, many companies are receiving orders but are unable to deliver on time. As a result, they’re finding themselves in a precarious position. If this situation continues, repaying bank loan installments will become difficult for them. We are relaying these problems to the government.”
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report