New Delhi: With the slowdown in India's auto sector, Hinduja Group flagship company Ashok Leyland on Friday announced five-day holiday for its Ennore plant in Chennai. As per Business Standard report, “the company has issued notice to the employees that the plant will not be working on September 6 and 7 of this week and September 10 and 11 of next week, while September 9 has already been declared as sixth non-working day. In effect, this would mean that the factory will not be operating till September 11.”

Ashok Leyland has cutting edge technology Electric Vehicle facility at the Ennore plant, which is the country's first integrated facility for design, prototyping, testing, process prototyping and solutions design. The slowdown in the automotive industry has forced many manufacturers and component suppliers to reduce production and plan temporary plant closure.

Earlier, one of India's largest vehicle maker, Maruti Suzuki, on Wednesday, said it has decided to shut down production of passenger vehicles in Gurugram and Manesar plants in Haryana for two days. This is perhaps for the first time in 10 years; the company has announces "no production days".

The automobile industry has suffered a huge drop in sales leading to 3.5 lakh job losses since the start of this fiscal. The sector has been going through a slowdown for the past few months due to several reasons including, high goods and services tax (GST) and liquidity crunch.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in Chennai on Sunday the GST Council would take the call on reducing the tax on motor vehicles. "One of the suggestion was the reduction of GST for the automobile sector, that of course will have to go to the (GST) Council," she said.

To help revive the sector, the Minister on August 23 had announced that the government departments would be allowed to buy new vehicles, automobiles purchased till March 31, 2020 could avail the benefit of additional depreciation of 15 per cent, with total depreciation up to 30 per cent, and BS-IV vehicles bought till March 31, 2020 would remain operational for their entire registration period.

(agency inputs)