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Amandeep Singh is one of thousands of workers who were laid off last year because of the shutdown of induction furnaces and steel re-rolling mills in Mandi Gobindgarh — a town located on both sides of the Grand Trunk Road in Punjab on the stretch between Ambala and Ludhiana.

Amandeep, who was laid off from Shri Vishnu Steels, lives with his mother in a rented room, in Khanna, a nearby town.

To call Amandeep’s place of residence a “room”, is to play fast and loose with the definition of the word. A hovel would be more accurate, a hole more appropriate. Natural lighting is minimal, ventilation is an alien concept and running water requires a trek outside. With barely enough space for one person, let alone two, the majority of the space is taken up by a rickety wooden-frame bed, a dusty television and an almirah that has clearly seen better days. A gas-stove and a small fridge make manoeuvring in the attached kitchen space almost impossible. They share a bathroom with three other families in similarly dire financial situations.

For over a year now, since the closure of the steel mill he worked for, Amandeep has been forced to do odd jobs to make ends meet. “First, I tried my hands at AC-repairing and then car-repairing after the shutdown of the steel mills. But changing profession isn’t as easy as it seems,” said Amandeep.

It’s been a month now since he has been back in the “Steel City” and has begun work at a trading firm. While his salary is nowhere close to what he was earning at the steel mill, Amandeep is considerably luckier than others who’ve found employment harder to come by.

Mandi Gobindgarh — also known as loha mandi — was once home to a sprawl of steel-related industry. It is now home to thousands of workers like Amandeep. While some have gone back to their hometowns in Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Bihar, others have remained in the town, hoping beyond hope for change while working as daily-wage labourers.

Parvesh Kumar is one such man. We met him as he struggled to find work for the day while standing in a crowd of similarly down-on-their-luck labourers who gather every morning at Amloh Road. The gathering point is at a crossroads, where labourers wait in hope of being hired for the day. The work is unspecialised and salaries are bargained for by the side of the dusty road. “It all depends on luck. Sometimes I get work continuously for a week or sometime a full week goes without work,” said Parvesh.

Parvesh is not a native of Mandi Gobindgarh. He comes from a village close to Bijnaur, Uttar Pradesh. Four years ago, his uncle found him employment at one of the newly-built induction furnaces. Now both are gone – his uncle back to Bijnaur and the furnace, out of production.

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“Mandi Gobindgarh used to be the ‘steel city of India’ and the ‘steel town of Asia’ till last year,” said Jatin Sood, proprietor of Royal Steels, one of the few steel mills still operating in the area.

According to a widely-believed story, Sikh Guru Hargobind Singh visited the town and was looking for steel to make horseshoes and swords. But there was no steel available in the town. The Guru then blessed the town saying “someday this place will be producing steel for the rest of the world.” And that’s how the town got its name Gobindgarh.

Up until 2003, Gobindgarh was a thriving steel-based economy, but things started to go downhill when the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the time excluded Punjab from a 10 year-long tax holiday in order to boost industry in the neighbouring states of Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and Uttarakhand.

“How are we supposed to compete with industries in neighbouring states when they’re getting an additional benefit of Rs 4,500 per ton on their production cost,” said Sood. He added, “The condition only got worse when the Punjab government launched Electronic – Transport Information within Punjab (e-Trip) in September, 2013.”

The e-Trip system was put in place by the Punjab government in 2012 to prevent tax-evasion by traders by maintaining electronic records of every consignment that makes its way out of the factory. But it faced widespread resistance from industries, resulting in its launch being postponed to August, 2013. After talks with industrialists, the government agreed to reduce the number of industries covered under e-Trip to six by making amendments in Section 51 of the Punjab VAT Act, 2005.

Unfortunately for Gobindgarh and its workforce, the iron and steel industry still came under e-Trip’s purview. And things only got worse when the 10-year-long tax holiday was extended for another five years in 2013.

“e-Trip affected the revenues of mills and several mills declared bankruptcy and plants started shutting down,” said Gurcharan Singh, who owns Raja Enterprises. He added, “After the shutting down of two famous steel re-rolling plants, local financiers stopped lending money to mills. This made it impossible for them to keep their plants running.”

“State policies are not business-oriented,” argued Vinod Vashisht, President of the All India Steel Re-Rollers Association (AISRA) and owner of Lakshmi Steels. He added, “These policies are the reason our production has gone down as low as 50 per cent. Consumers are not coming to buy our products because the same products are available for cheaper prices in neighbouring states. Thousands of people have been left unemployed.”

Sood concurs. “It is the first time in the last 30 years, since we established Royal Steels, that we’re working for barely four to five days a week with only a single shift. Earlier it used to be two shifts per day and even Sundays used to be working days.”

Sood is currently struggling to keep the three mills he owns in operation.

Sood and his friends, who are also factory owners, sat in protest for 65 days. They even met political leaders like Bhagwant Mann and Pratap Singh Bajwa in the hopes of solving their problem, but to no avail. Now, Sood and his friends are back in their factories and are trying to keep them running as best they can.

At one point in time there were more than 500 steel recycling induction furnaces and re-rolling mills functioning in Gobindgarh. Now, half the mills in town are either not producing anything or have been dismantled to cover costs.

“Almost 500 people work with a mill when it is functioning. A hundred inside the mill and 400 outside – either carrying raw material or trading in the finished goods produced by the mill. If one steel mill stops production it affects all these people,” says Vashisht. He goes on to lament the current state of Gobindgarh: “Three things are important for a town to be successful as an industrial town. First is the availability of raw material. Second, there needs to be adequate consumption of the industrial produce and, third, it should be close to a port. Mandi Gobindgarh lacks all these attributes.”

The shutdown of the factories has brought down the total production capacity of the town by 50 per cent. “Factories that have been functioning for more than 40 years are the ones surviving, those who set up their mills recently have had to bear the brunt of government policies,” says Sood.

While owners of steel mills are in an unenviable position, the condition of their labourers is far worse. A labourer at Lakshmi Steels who asked to remain anonymous says: “The situation is so bad that one labourer is doing the job of three workers. Since there is hardly any job available, people don’t have any choice.”

While Sood and Vashisht both refuted such allegations, labourers were unanimous in their version. Still, labourers at the steel mills get considerably better remuneration than the likes of Amandeep and Parvesh, but if the government doesn’t take steps to aid the steel mills of Gobindgarh, then it won’t be long before these labourers too find themselves competing for jobs in the dustiness of Amloh Road.