Forging is considered a key integral part of manufacturing industry. The forging industry supports economic growth of the nation through vital sectors such as automotive, heavy industrial machinery, power, construction & mining equipments, railways and engineering in general.
The Government’s thrust on manufacturing sector with initiatives like ‘Make in India’ and ‘Skill India’ has definitely created positive economic sentiments amongst the business community. Many global OEMs and Tier-I players are setting up purchasing offices in India and looking at procuring high standard quality products.
Forging units in India are mainly classified as very large (with capacity over 75,000 MT), large (capacity ranging 30,000 to 75,000 MT), medium (capacity over 12,500 upto 30,000 MT), small (ranging from 5,000 to 12,500 MT) and very small (upto 5,000 MT capacity). The Indian forging industry has evolved from being a labour-intensive industry to capital-intensive manufacturing sector. The current investment in the plant and machinery by Indian forging companies is worth of INR 28,910 crore.
With an annual output of about 30 Lakh MT, the Indian forging industry has about close to 400 forging units, of which 83 percent can broadly be categorized as Tiny and Small Enterprises. While 9 percent are Medium Sized, the remaining being Large Scale. While SMEs contribute 30 percent of forging production, the Medium and Large-Scale units contribute 70 percent. With a total production worth INR 45000-50000 crore the forging industry provides direct employment to more than 300,000 people in the country along with an additional 60000 contract labourers.
Companies in the Indian forging industry is concentrated around its end user customer locations. Therefore, the major forging clusters are found to be in the states of Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Delhi, Karnataka, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. States such as Maharashtra, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Jharkhand and Delhi. India is the world’s third-largest casting producer. This will further open more opportunities for castings and forging industries both for domestic production and for exports.