Permanent electricity shortage and unrest in the metropolis have pushed at least 60 percent cottage industries to closures with thousands of labourers jobless, said small traders on Tuesday.
"The present wave of violence has reduced the production level of cottage industry to mere 30 percent leaving thousands of workers without a job in the country's largest city," the Karachi chapters' President All Pakistan Organisation of Small Traders and Cottage Industry, Mehmood Hamid said.
He said the small traders and cottage industrialists had already been facing a serious problem of power outages on a daily basis which had scaled down the production level to 60 percent and the recent bloodshed in the city further decreased their unproductively to 30 percent.
"Long hours electricity load shedding and unavailability of labourers because of the violence have jointly scaled back the production level to 30 percent," he said, adding about 60 percent of the industrial units had reached closures under unviable economic conditions.
He said a cottage unit employed 50 to 150 workers which largely located in North Karachi, Landhi, Korangi, Orangi, Mehmoodabad, Qayoomabad, Federal B. Area etc, and mainly were engaged in the business of toys, shoes, dying, garments, automobile parts like brake-shoes, bikes' kicks, etc.
He attributed the decline in the cottage industries' closures and reduction in the growth to the continued rise in inflation, power outages and unabated spontaneous violence, saying a large number of labourers were even unable to reach their workplace due to city violence.
"If the owner is unable to run his unit for soaring cost then definitely it will lead to the business closure and sacking of workers, resultantly unemployment will rise," Hamid said.
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