Going by PM Modi’s yardstick, selling pakodas is a job and S. Krishnakumar should easily qualify as employed: he runs a roadside eatery in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. But the eatery has been a demotion of sorts for Krishnakumar. He used to run a lathe workshop that manufactured parts for motor pumps. It also employed six people. But he had to send them away as his unit folded up. He has only one villain to blame for his present travails—GST.
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“Before GST, we had steady orders of parts from pump makers. But they started dwindling after the tax came into place,” Krishnakumar tells Outlook. “Unless we get job orders for a minimum of Rs 2,000 a day, we cannot pay our workers. The orders came down to a trickle before dying down. Almost all small industries are in the doldrums,” he...
