GUJRAT: Continuing with its traditional zeal for things mechanical, the city of Gujrat has about 100 units with a workforce of about 15,000.

The manual lathe machine was brought to the area by the British rulers about a century ago, but the local people were soon able to copy the design and develop their own version, which, though rough, was good enough for them to help them in their traditional profession of manufacturing silver jugs and other pieces of crockery. During the World War II , these locally-manufactured machines became a major source of supplies to the British armoury by manufacturing screws and bolts.

Once the war was over, lathe machine operators saw their business going down and started looking for alternatives. One Haji Mohammad Azam is said to be the man who went to pre-partition Batala, learnt a few things about fan-manufacturing and returned to produce the newly-independent Pakistan’s first locally-produced fan. The second generation of these early manufacturers brought fresh technology in the mid-70s, but it was also copied soon within two to three years and by the ‘80s, every fan-manufacturing unit in Gujrat had these ‘spot machines’.The same was the case with the automatic winding machine which was brought in the early 1990s from Taiwan.

There are dozens of other machines, such as big ovens, presses etc., that have been first imported and then manufactured by the locals in the last quarter of a century. The local fan industry is now planning to purchase automatic assembly lines from the international market to enhance its generation capacity due to increasing export of electric fans.