Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd. to set up factory in Bangladesh

Indian Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd. has expressed its keen interest to set up farm machineries assembling factory in Bangladesh amid growing demand of farm machineries under labour shortage concern mounting day by day facing by country’s subsistence agriculture sector.

“The Indian automobile manufacturing conglomerate ‘Mahindra and Mahindra Limited’ is planning to set up farm machineries assembling factory here,” said its Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Pawan Kumar Goenka.

The plan was revealed officially during a virtual platform meeting held with Agriculture Minister Dr M Abdur Razzaque here today.

Besides, the Indian company will take initiative to create trained manpower for easing maintenance and popularize farm machineries at the grassroots of the country, the CEO told the virtual meeting.

India has a huge scope to make investment in Bangladesh as the country has nearly 1.2 billion US$ market of farm machineries that flourishing annually with 10% growth rate under the perspective of serious labour crisis prevailing in the agriculture sector.

To make the agriculture sector profitable, the government is giving priority on the farm mechanization and also has taken a Taka 3,000 crore project for distributing nearly 51,000 farm machineries through the project.

Particularly, a project of Taka 200 crore has been taken this year for providing farm machineries including ‘combined harvester’ and ‘reaper’ among the farmers with 50 to 70 percent subsidy, said the agriculture minister to reporters in a briefing after the meeting.

Along with setting up the machineries assembling factory, he said, the Indian company also will assign the local spare parts manufacturers and small entrepreneurs for manufacturing machineries in locally.

Considering higher price of the farm machineries, the company will distribute financial loans among the farmers for purchasing expensive machineries, Dr Razzaque told the briefing.

Additional Agriculture Secretaries M Hasanuzzaman Kallol and Dr M Abdur Rauf, Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation Chairman M

Sayedul Islam, Mahindra and Mahindra (M&M’s) Farm Equipment Sector (FES) President Hemant Sikka, its country head Rabin Kumar Das and other top officials were also joined the meeting.

The meeting was held as a follow-up of a digital conference held between Bangladesh and India last year.

(Source: BSS)