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| Wednesday, 30 April 2003 |
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30,000 SMEs will benefit by upgrading local foundry industry - Bogollagama by Chamitha Kuruppu Sri Lanka will lay more emphasis on the development of Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) and upgrade the level of local industrialists for them to compete locally and globally. Minister of Industries Rohitha Bogollagama told a seminar on 'Quality Castings' yesterday in Colombo that emphasising SMEs is the success story in most of the countries in the region and Sri Lanka too will give more prominence to the growth of SMEs. Bogollagama said that by forming and upgrading the local foundry industry the government will also develop nearly 30,000 SMEs in the country. The foundry industry is the breadwinner of most SMEs in Sri Lanka, he said. A five-year Foundry Technology Development Project (FTDP) under the Japan International Co-operation Agency (JICA) was set up at the Industrial Development Board (IDB) to improve the technical know-how of Engineers and Technicians in the foundry industry and to improve the quality of foundry products to reduce dependence on import of foundry products. As a result of the successful completion of this five-year project, assistance was provided by JICA for a follow-up program to further develop the awareness on foundry technology under this project. The seminar was organised by the Foundry Project of the IDB. Lack of human resources, purchase of raw material, inadequate orders for production and the 20% VAT are the bottlenecks faced by foundry industrialists in Sri Lanka in developing the industry. Experts said that though there is potential in competing with their more advanced counterparts in other countries, the foundry industry is facing a drawback due to the difficulties faced by industrialists. Resident Representative JICA T. Sigihara said that lack of human resource is one of the bottlenecks faced when developing the foundry industry in Sri Lanka. " There is great potential in the industry, therefore measures should be taken to overcome such problems immediately," he said. He said that by developing the foundry industry more employment opportunities will be created. The five-year FTD project and the two-year follow-up project have enabled industrialists to improve the quality of their projects, Sigihara said. "But there are many factors to improve the present level of technology of the foundry industry to be more advanced," he said. He said that JICA will continue to extend support to the IDB to develop the industry. Japanese Ambassador Seiichiro Otsuka said that the project which cost Japanese Yen 387 million helped train foundry industrialists locally as well as in Japan. The IDB has trained 27 industrialists in pattern making, 40 in sand moulding, 32 in melting, 12 in combined pattern/sand moulding and letting and 17 graduate engineers to fulfil the requirement for Chartered Engineers. |
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