Infra constraints may force L&T out of Mumbai to Gujarat

Engineering and construction giant Larsen & Toubro is considering moving its manufacturing facilities out of Mumbai to Surat in Gujarat due to infrastructure constraints in India's financial capital, according to a report.

For the Powai-headquartered company, moving heavy machinery to and from the Mumbai Port Trust in South Mumbai and the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust in Panvel is becoming a logistic nightmare due to chaotic traffic and congested roads.

A Mumbai Mirror report on Saturday quoted an L&T spokesman as saying that Mumbai's new bridges and flyovers are making it ''extremely difficult to ship out large fabricated items to the docks or out of Mumbai.''

With Gujarat increasingly becoming the pet state of industrialists as its business environment improves while that of Maharashtra deteriorates, the report says it is not surprising that L&T wants to shift the bigger jobs at its heavy engineering unit to Gujarat. The company has already invested Rs8,000 crore in Gujarat and employs 5,000 at its Hazira unit in that state.

L&T is planning power and manufacturing plants in Hazira and in Vadodara, which the company feels will be one of the largest core-engineering hubs in India by 2020, according to the report.