Labour shortage...

For that he stressed national policies on education and vocational training must be in place. Meanwhile NCE Vice President Ravi Jayawardena, who is a leading toy exporter in the country, said that he is currently operating with 2/3 of the capacity because he could not find people to run the spare capacity in his factory in Gampaha.

His company, Golden Palm Crafts (Pvt) Limited, specializes in manufacturing wooden toys for some of the leading European retailers under their brands for little over three decades.

Jayawardena, a former corporate executive turned entrepreneur, said the majority who he interviews say that they cannot work without a computer. “This shows that our people don’t anymore want to make their hands dirty. They want to work inside an air conditioned cubicle with a lap top on their table,” he said. The NCE is currently engaging with the relevant government authorities in finding a durable solution for the skills gap in the country, which could even paralyze the manufacturing sector.

When economies develop, people become more aspirational and they tend to prefer more white-collar jobs to blue collar ones.

Developed and emerging economies have tried to address this issue of deploying more robotic technology to do the bulk the production on factory floors.