Holi colour industry seeks tax relief

Vishal Sharma
New Delhi/ Agra. Holi is round the corner and industry too is bracing itself for the festival. A small town at 65 km from Agra, Hathras, is known for cold storages and its perfume industry. It also boasts of numerous large and small industrial units manufacturing synthetic dye-based colours and Gulal.

Production in these units begins from Diwali and almost a week before the festival the town ships tonnes of colours to different parts of the country.

From just three small-scale units about 60 years back, the Holi colours industry of Hathras has become one of the largest producers of synthetic dye-based Holi colours in the country. Today it has 70 units engaged in the production of colours.

Deepak Goyal, a partner in Shakti Enterprises, a mid-sized manufacturer of Gulal, told Business Standard that Holi colours of Hathras were marketed all over the country under various brand names.

He said that the colours manufactured in Hathras were purely chemical dye-based and only recently had the colour manufacturers shown inclination towards herbal colours that are environment-friendly.

Recently, he said, this booming business of colours had begun facing tough competition from the colour manufacturers based in South India.

Hathras has almost lost the southern India market to these companies and it had become imperative that the 4 per cent VAT should be removed for the survival of this industry, which was inherently comprised of numerous small-scale enterprises that could not survive otherwise, in this competitive market.

This year, the colour manufacturers of Hathras have introduced new variants of chemical dyes that are relatively less toxic than the stuff sold earlier.

According to Sanjay Agarwal, director, Ambey Chemical Industries, the chemicals used in the manufacture of Holi colours include Auramine, Malachite, Rodamine, Methylene.

Besides manufacturing the usual powder colours, the dye industry of Hathras is always innovating.

The latest addition this year is a perfumed colour spray in a ready-to-use can.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Woman torched to death by inlaws on International Women's Day in India

AGRA.               It could serve as a well-placed slap in the face of the the groups of so-called women's rights activists who all too recently celebrated International Women’s Day, fervently praising the contribution made by women to the society and vowing to prevent violence against the feminine gender comfortably ensconced in luxurious clubs and hotels.    While the world was busy celebrating women’s day, a young girl was murdered in cold-blood, torched to death by her in-laws in Kayamganj town of Farrukhabad district of Uttar Pradesh, alongwith a 6-month fetus inside her, just three years after marriage.    Two weeks have passed since the grisly murder but the local police appears to be in no hurry to catch the absconding in-laws who doused the girl in kerosene and left her to burn and die on the street, making good their escape while the locals awaited for the police to arrive. Meanwhile, the victim’s mother Archana Sharma has suffered from a strok...
Read more

Chambal Bandit for 30 years, Nirbhay retires to the Himalayas

VIJAY UPADHYAY ETAWAH/BHIND. For 30 years, he ruled the Chambal with a steady hand but weakened by age and continually dogged by the police, Nirbhay Gujjar, the last remaining edifice of the old stock of bandits from India’s own “Wild-Wild West”, may have at last taken a peaceful retirement in the Himalayas, that he was vying for a long time. Reports filtering in from the Chambal ravines of Etawah district of Uttar Pradesh and the adjoining Bhind of Madhya Pradesh indicate that this most feared bandit of Chambal has finally given up the ghost, following the rising waters of the river and the depleting strength of his gang due to regular encounters by the police of these two states. According to the residents of the villages of Etawah, Bhind & Kalpi, Jaloun districts, Nirbhay has not been seen in these parts for quite some time and his regular contacts in the villages are no longer active. The gang has even gone untraceable on the electronic surveillance net of the police. Sources ...
Read more

Trade tax hits Agra`s dal mills

The 4.5 per cent trade tax has reduced incomes to merely Rs 2,500-3,000 per metric tonne Vishal Sharma New Delhi/ Agra. There was a time when the “dal mills” of Agra catered for the processing needs of faraway states like Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. Today, this industry is just a sorry remnant of its prosperous past. Once spread all across the town with 150 units working in tandem to process over 400 tonnes of pulses a day and a clientele spread throughout the country, Agra’s dal mill industry has now shrunk to barely 30-35 units processing little more than 75 tonnes of pulses. The repercussions of the weakening pulse of this “pulse-processing industry” can be felt in the machine-tool forging units in the Nunhai industrial area of the town, where production of dal mill equipment has dropped to less than a quarter of what was produced earlier. These units now lay more stress on producing flour mill equipment. According to Agra Dal Mill Association General Secret...
Read more