Inside Dharwad's blue dot experiment

Dharwad's paradox: The district has over 3,100 MSMEs, generating 8,000-10,000 fresher openings a year. About 2,000 students pass out ifITIs annually. And yet, MSMEs report shortages, while placement rates for youth remain south of 25-30%. The gap isn't supply or demand. It's visibility and trust.

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"Even though we are called Karnataka's second capital, this region never got the parent industries," said Ramesh Patil, who runs Patil Electric Works, a 120-employee firm that supplies components to Bosch and Tata Motors.

Instead, Dharwad's factories were left to survive as feeder units. "We are surrounded by hundreds of MSMEs that supply components," Patil added, "but the anchor industries that could have changed this region's trajectory never came."

Girish Nalwadi, president of the North Karnataka Small Scale Industry Association, pointed out that the state's heavyweights-BEL, BHEL, BEML-had their large units elsewhere. "BEL has got 12 manufacturing units across the country," he said. "There is nothing in north Karnataka."

That absence of anchors produced another paradox. North Karnataka exported labour to the south, even as its own factories remained starved of workers.

LOOKING AHEAD