Board Assembling Industry

Our workshop is at 45/7 in Cherrian Nagar, over in the New Washermen Pet area of Chennai. It’s a busy, tight-knit neighborhood with a lot of small industries and houses all mixed together. We do board assembly here, which means there’s usually the smell of solder in the air and piles of small components on the workbenches. The space isn’t very big, so we have to be careful about where we put things. Most of the work is done under bright lamps, and it can get pretty hot in the afternoons, even with the fans going full blast. We’ve got a small team of people who have been doing this for a long time. We aren’t a huge factory with conveyor belts; it’s more of a manual setup where things are put together by hand. You’ll see people sitting hunched over boards for hours, making sure every little part is in the right place. The streets outside are usually crowded with carts and people, so getting deliveries in and out can be a bit of a challenge. We mostly just focus on the task at hand and try to keep up with the orders that come in. It’s a lot of repetitive work, but we’re used to it. We take our tea breaks together when the heat gets too much. It’s just a regular local industry making parts for bigger machines elsewhere. Sometimes the power goes out and we have to wait a bit, but that is just part of life here.