Start from here. This is my stitching department, which has about 15 machines out here. And we have only 21 tailors. 

 

R. Takor is finding it hard to staff its garment manufacturing unit. He says labourers want higher wages because there being more for everything from food to fuel. Inflation is also driving up the cost of raw materials at a time when demand is low. 

 

Well if I had 50 machines and 50 tailors we could definitely get in about 500 pieces of the finished garment everyday with the entire setup which is here. 

 

And how many are you producing these days?

 

A 250, almost half.

 

Faced with similar problems, manufacturing companies across India are scaling back or in some cases shutting down, causing manufacturing activity, considered the main engine for growth, to contract at the first quarter of this year, against a rise of 7% last year.

 

What’s happening in this manufacturing unit is representative of the overall economy it’s slowing down. India’s GDP rate is now 5.3%, its lowest level in almost a decade. 

 

Credit rating agencies are losing confidence in India’s growth story. Fitch downgraded India’s outlook to negative. And Standard & Poor’s warned it will lower India’s investment status to junk. It blames India’s economic problems on its politics. But experts say these threats are overblown and the fundamentals of the Indian economy are still strong. 

 

We’ve seen over the last year that the government strived to push through with something, introducing FDI multi-brand retail that had to be hastily withdrawn because of the coalition politics. Eh, we’ve seen that pusing up these practices is hard. So clearly I think the politics isn’t interferring with policy. But I think that’s not true just of India, it’s true all over the world at this final time. 

 

At the Ritch Tah’s tiny manufacturing company in Mumbai, a dozen employees are stitching cotton shirts. Tah says he’s struggling to make ends meet. And it wouldn’t have been the case, if the government had allowed international players like Wal-Mart to enter the domestic market. 

 

Ruled out that if we really got much more orders.

 

That may have made all the difference to him and to Takor as they struggle to keep their sewing machines spinning and employees on the job.