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1 Introduction
Bengal is the birth place of Match Industry in India. The first match wood industry was established in West Bengal in 1920 s and Second in Tamil Nadu during 1923 at Sivakasi producing Lucifer matches. The small scale handmade match industries in Sivakasi, Kovilpatti, Sattur, Kalugumalai, Elayirampannai and Sankarankoil towns of Tamil Nadu state show a highly organized network (Saresh et.al., 2011). Wooden match production in India is split into three sectoral categories; the mechanized large scale sector; the handmade small scale sector; and the cottage sector. Around 82 per cent of the total match production is in the hand made, small scale accounted for 67 per cent and the cottage sector accounted to be only 15 per cent where technology has remained relatively simple. These two non mechanized sectors of the match industry are distinguished primarily by output size. The industry as a whole directly employs an estimated 2.50 lakh people with only 6000 of these in the mechanized sector. The cottage sector which involves totally manual operations and produces less than 75 million match sticks per year and is often household based, accounts for about 50 000 workers. Thus, small scale, factory based match production units employ by far the largest number of people involved in the match sector (Tandon, 1990) especially the women folk share 74 per cent of the total workforce employed in match production in the state of Tamil Nadu (Daljeet Singh, 2014).
On an average, the requirement of wooden match splints is 1.6 crore kg or 16000 tonnes in a month. To meet this demand, the soft wood trees are also imported from China. It will take 15 to 20 days for the shipment to reach the Thoothukkudi port. During transit, the wooden logs get discolored and thus wooden splints extracted from them will become unfit for use, The cost of imported wooden splint is Rs. 46 per kg whereas in the local market it is available for even Rs 30 per kg (The Hindu 2015). Moreover, there is no possibility of getting them imported on a continuous basis. To meet the raw material demand, re-plantation of soft wood trees in the farm lands are planned by the producing firms.
The major raw materials used in...