Batuk Vora trails the "Manchester of India" on the eve of Texpo '98 being held in the city.

Hailed once as the "Manchester of India" for its vibrant textile industry, this city is now a warehouse of broken dreams and rusted machines. Ahmedabad, which once boasted of as many as 64 textile mills, is now home to at least 65,000 laid-off workers struggling to survive. Nearly 10,000 of them have bid goodbye to the city. The sorry predicament, says a study by concerned workers of Ahmedabad, is a result of government apathy in reviving sick units. It prefers the more convenient way of just laying off workers in thousands by offering a fair amount of compensation under the voluntary retirement scheme (VRS) and shutting down the once money-spinning mills.

Gujarat once had 84 mills, while India had 1,000 mills till about two decades ago. The national Textile Corporation had to take over some 119 mills that were declared sick. Within the last decades, 23 mills have gone bankrupt and 28 closed down. Workers of six of these 28 mills took their claims to the courts, and another 14,000 workers of 11 mills taken over by Gujarat State Textile Corporation (GSTC) were shown the door with the VRS.

The Central government is not prepared to learn from the Gujarat example. The textile ministry is reportedly evolving a package of VRS, on the Gujarat pattern, to lay off thousands of workers in the 119 NTC mills by giving them attractive compensation. The move " may temporarily please the workers, but in fact would fix the last nail on the coffin of textile industry's regeneration in the country," says the study led by Devshibhai Patel, himself a former textile workers and former government employee at the state information department. VRS could cost the NTC around s 20bn.

"VRS actually means all the three sides (workers, owners and politicians) will wash off their hands from any new imaginative measure to revive the sick units," said Patel. " It happened in Gujarat and now the NTC will implement such scheme nationwide." A cash amount of about Rs. 147m was distributed last year as VRS to the unemployed workers of 11 mills in Ahmedabad and the mills were allowed to auction their precious land to builders who built commercial centres on it.

Ahmedabad was thus effectively turned into a city divided in two: builders and rich people with their luxury villas and commercial centres on the one side; thousands of tea stalls and vegetable carts for workers on the other.

According to Gujarat's former finance minister and former Member of Parliament Sanat Mehta, a proposal worked out with great care to revamp the closed units in the state has been shelved again, like in the past. "I made a scheme at that time under the instruction of the economic adviser to the Centre's Industrial Development Department," he says. "Ahmedabad's share in the new national investment, which stood at 4.2 per cent, had come down to 2.54 per cent between 1982 to 1992. Under this new scheme, vast areas of land of these mills were to be used to establish new industrial units and also partial sale of the same to pay off the workers' dues." A total amount of about Rs 2bn could be raised from the partial sale of assets. The workers' dues were coming to Rs 867m. "We asked the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction to allow the state government to implement this scheme. We showed them how some 60,000 workers could be provided jobs without actually selling off the land but to revive new units on it. But the Centre never responded positively on it," he laments.

Patel Says: "Our study has come to an inescapable conclusion that textile barons wanted to reap maximum, easy and fast income without running their industrial units and so they corrupted the local politicians to be allowed to sell their land and assets to build commercial centres."

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