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He said that the industrial estates will have dairy-based, food processing and light metal and cement based industries.
With infrastructure in the north and the east having been improved since 2009, transporting raw materials as well as finished products via road and rail is now possible. It will support the creation of employment opportunities in the industrial estates and the youth in those areas will get an opportunity to start self employed microindustries in the region.
He said that in the last 45 years 19 industrial estates have been registered under the IDB while 390 micro and small industries are in operation.
Small and medium industries are the backbone of the country and therefore the IDB is planning to improve existing micro and small industries in terms of productivity to compete with against substandard imported products.
Rajabdeen said that the IDB wants to identify micro and small industries that are not competitive and provide them with technical assistance to improve their industries and transform them into efficient manufacturing processes.
The Mahinda Chinthana Vision is aimed at improving the productivity of all industries as well as restructuring sick industries to be efficient and productive. He said that the products manufactured by some of the industries are of a very high standard but lack packaging and aggressive marketing.
Rajabdeen said that he as the Chairman is making arrangements to have a separate section for research and development which can facilitate industries to improve from micro to small and small to medium.
He said that the IDB is taking all measures to identify viable projects, train youth with technical assistance and arrange low-cost finance for micro and small projects. The vision of the IDB is to create employment for youth who complete university studies and offer educational based training in various fields so that they will not depend on government jobs.
Even though our population is 21 million we consider the country as a hub therefore we can access all the people in the SAARC region which is more than 1.2 billion. This will greatly help the industries as our country has signed FTA agreements with India and Pakistan.
In addition IDB is also conducting research to manufacture rubber-based automatic products mainly for export said Rajabdeen.
