Views and feedback of industry in dynamic foundry group forum

In this write-up, we present opinions from various perspectives from the Dynamic Foundry Group Forum. The opinions are primarily pertaining to 5 areas such as making Foundry high-paying and attractive, Role of the academic institutions, the inverted pyramid, the owner mindset and who will take the first step in initiating desirable changes? Let’s take a look at the views expressed by various stakeholders and take the conversation further by getting your views and inputs on related topics.

Opinion 1: Making foundry high-paying and attractive

• Will the industry be ready to pay more for a trained individual?
• If the industry takes the steps of offering a higher salary bracket to training/skilled employees, more employees would themselves invest in their upskilling.
• This is how the trend for engineering education came to rise with the assurance that with the technical degree in hand, a better pay can be assured.
• Why is young generation shying away from foundry? The answer is low income at foundry. We need to attack on increasing foundry profitability.
• One way is by training. We also need to identify which areas need real training. Is it related to foundry technology or related to discipline, understanding of productivity, efforts/physical stress( hard work) vs productivity.
• We need to make foundry attractive both operation wise, efficiency, personal growth and long term future in this. If this things young engineer would see they will get attracted. But this can not  change overnight nor with any technology or equipment. It’s a journey.

Opinion 2: Role of the academic institutions

• Are the colleges ready to introspect?
• CEO of Tech Mahindra says 85% of Engineering graduates are unemployable. Teaching class must introspect for their products.
• 60% weightage should be given to practical classes and projects, theory only 40%.
• Currently, just 10% focus is given to practical projects which too can be bought from shop or just copied from seniors.
• Why should the industry employ an Engineer, when a B.Sc Maths has a better theoretical understanding?
• Some major discrepancy in the Engineering course structure.

Opinion 3: The inverted pyramid

• The proportion of Engineers- Diplomas – ITI-Artisans should be not inverted pyramid, Barring research and process Technology. I think this is also one of the causes of not finding jobs. In every profession, be it medical even – unless proportion of support staff is balanced – there will be failures / frustrations.  This disproportion is in a way legacy from British time – Salary structure. Saheb gets heavily paid for doing a little. If you look at Swiss- -German and French salary structure the ratio is generally 1:3 or so. Then Attraction will be there for getting trained at all levels and not that everyone will like to be graduate.
• We have to differentiate role of technician and engineers. Engineer is knowledge centre and technician is work centre. Indian Engineers are known to be knowledgeable in general but we lack Technicians.  Engineer is ‘know how’ – Technician is ‘do how’.  For one ‘know how’ you need 4 – 5 ‘do how’. This is generic observation.

Opinion 4: The owner mindset

• Well there should be a change in attitude of owners and management, many times we find this class saying bluntly to professional trainers ” sir training se khas kuch hota nahi..sir ap srif kya karna hai ye hame batado hum karva lenge unse (training doesn’t serve the purpose, you let us know what needs to be done, and we will get it done) ” and thus there is no scope to train people, or many a times they are reluctant to send their workforce for training and seminar and look for short term gain of that days work
• Some owner who have two units and going for third say nothing happens with training. And allege that if we train people they will leave the job and migrate to other foundries
• And these type of foundry do have a big turnover of supervisors coming and going managers coming and going
• [Awareness training required first for Foundry owners to change mind set for present scenario.
• Take case of govt polytechnic course. I find many supervisors really wanting to go for those courses but owner do not allow to go a bit early for the required attendance of lectures…now if we do not invest how can we reap benefits….
• I do agree with your findings. Owners have to be more receptive to training needs
• The owner is already paying the price of not training its workforce 
• Our Foundries are generally small/medium size industries and cannot survive if there is leak in his profits
• Losses due-to lack of training, is again paid by the worker, when the owner pushes out the worker due to rejections and losses
• The worker pays the price by punishment
• But the ultimate punishment is to the owner These owners assume other growing foundries must be earning by unscrupulous methods.

Opinion 5: Who will bell the cat?

• Without any funding it often has to depend on self-financing of programs but funding might lead to dilution of intent
• The best we can do is partner with like-minded industries, and take it across the industrial belts with the support of industry. Once again – money is not the issue, intent and commitment has to be of high level
• A wholesome blue print and extend to many centres to be practical e.g. Rajkot – Pune – Belgaum – Kolhapur and many more Foundry/ industrial hubs . This requires a round table meeting – planning / form an execution body – draw a blue print – Act- monitor.
• The foundries to select candidates on the merits put them to ACE Foundation by paying the fees, ask them to report to ACE Foundation, complete the course, get a certificate and then join foundry. They will be assets to foundry. Same is the process in police academy, military, defence forces…so why shy away for foundries. 
• This will fill the voids in the pyramid and strengthens it  …let us think over…experienced foundrymen will learn from freshers in a smiling atmosphere. If need be they can be pushed to ACE Foundation.

Compiled by Guest author: Nihar Agarwal, ACE Foundation, she can be reached at nihar@acefound.org