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Where it all started…
It was 1981…and a town called Hosur . We were then a small company called Prabha Engineers. We came into existence almost coinciding with Ashok Leyland opening its second plant, at Hosur. We became their ancillary meeting their OEM needs.
In the 80s, Hosur was developed as an industrial town. But it had poor infrastructure, non availability of skilled workmen and the huge labour unrest. This did not offer a conducive climate for small businesses to develop. There were no benchmarks to follow and many SSIs perished within the first 5 to 10 years of operation. Very few survived and not many grew.
At Prabha we had about 10 employees, poor infrastructure and workmen with very low morale. But yet we had a cause to survive- the vendor rating we received from Ashok Leyland lent us a lot of hope “ Excellent quality, but high cost; not dependable".
The Trend
The talk going around the SSI industry circuit was all about:
MATERIAL – MACHINE –MONEY -METHODS
The sum total of this was called "knowhow". If you had technology,if you had foreign collaboration, if you had money to invest and access to raw material, you had it all..or so it was thought. But yet there were no success stories to tell; no achievements to look upto; no turnarounds to emulate- only closures and failures.We wondered Why?
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