The State government has on Monday formally taken over the Kerala Spinners, a joint sector spinning mill that was shut down in 2003 after it ran into losses.
Finance Minister T.M. Thomas Isaac handed over the keys of the firm to Kerala State Textile Corporation (KSTC) chairman P. Nandakumar and managing director M. Ganesh with the KSTC slated to run the show from now on.
Dr. Isaac said the event was indication of a whole new chapter being written in the State’s developmental progress charts, since this was the first time in the country that a State was re-opening and taking over a firm that ran into losses after being managed by private hands.
Kerala, in that sense, was scripting wonders in the country’s public sector scenario, where many public sector units were on the verge of being privatised. In Kerala however, PSUs were being turned into profit-making units by the Left Democratic Front Government, he said.
Announcing that the government would open a new public sector mill on the premises during the tenure of the LDF, Dr. Isaac said the government was also preparing to file a case against the management of the firm, which had deserted the employees and refused to open the mill despite several meetings by the government. Their assets on the factory premises were already frozen.
The Minister also said the Excel Glass Factory in Alappuzha, which was shut down for over 500 days now, would be reopened soon. The government had warned the owner that he would not be able to run his other businesses or transactions with the government if the factory was not re-opened.
The Roads and Bridges Corporation too was being given a chance for a comeback, with the government paying off its dues worth Rs.75 crore to HUDCO, apart from increasing its share capital in the corporation from Rs.10 crore to Rs. 50 crore. A loan of Rs. 500 crore from HUDCO was also being arranged so that the corporation could complete all pending projects for road-over-bridges in the State in the next one year, he added.
Industries Minister Elamaram Kareem, presiding over the function, said new equipment would be purchased for the spinning mill and the existing repaired. An initial estimate suggested that Rs. 11.9 crore would be required for re-opening and running the Kerala Spinners, he added.
