SPECIAL ARTICLE
June 19, 2010
vol xlv no 25
EPW
Economic & Political
Weekly
64
Mousumi Majumdar (
mousumimajumdar@gmail.com
) and Sarbajit
S
engupta are at the department of economics and politics, Visva Bharati,
Santiniketan, West Bengal.
Declining Registration by Small Manufacturing
Units: A Case Study of Durgapur
Mousumi Majumdar, Sarbajit Sengupta
Economic policy since Independence has provided
various benefits to small enterprises to ensure
employment to workers who did not find work in the
organised sector. These benefits provided incentives to
small entrepreneurs to formally register their enterprises.
This paper examines the impact of liberalisation – which
led to a withdrawal of many of these benefits – on the
registration of small enterprises. There appears to be a
sharp fall in the growth rate of employment in registered
small enterprises around the time of liberalisation. A case
study of Durgapur in West Bengal shows that while
registration has a positive impact on profits for firms
set up before liberalisation, no such trend exists for
post-liberalisation firms.