In Ludhiana I visited the A.S.S. Foundry, which produces agricultural machinery entirely by hand. This lack of any mechanisation is unusual but the owners claim it is what enables them to make high-quality machines. I don't know how hand-beaten blades compare to machine-cut or forged ones, but certainly the foundry has a very high reputation and sends machinery - primarily direct seeders for rice, wheat and maize, but also some other specialised machines - all over South Asia. They also make bespoke machines: recently the foundry sent a coriander planter to the UK.
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| The entrance to the foundry, with the owner's house above and a completed potato planter in the foreground |
I visited the foundry on a pleasantly warm, sunny day. Walking inside the large production room felt like walking underground - it was at street level, but with no natural light except the entrance way, and it extended back for a couple of hundred meters. The owner's family home was above the foundry.
At different points men were working singly or in pairs on parts of machines; each work area was lit by one or two powerful spotlights and by the light of the men's welding torches. The air was musty and cooler than outside.
There were large piles of bricks, fabricated shapes (blades, tines, wheels, gears, frames, etc) and raw materials.
Being in the foundry felt like walking back in time: I'm sure it was a good paying job (and in many ways much easier than other jobs like cycling a rickshaw or labouring on the roads) but it looked like hard physical work, with the potential for catastrophic and irreversible dangers. It's not often I'm consciously glad to have strong industrial protections and health and safety laws, but today I certainly was!
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| Components in the foreground, being assembled into machines in the rear |
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| A direct seeder being assembled |
Outside the finished machines were spray painted before being set aside for inspection and sale.
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