Who Will Run Your Plant in 2035?

Every packaging factory in India has one. The man who can stand at the lamination machine, look at the web for four seconds, and tell you the bond is going to fail before the reel is off the shaft.

Nobody taught him that. He learned it over nineteen years, mostly by being there when it went wrong. He cannot explain how he knows. And in six years he is going to retire, and everything he knows is going to walk out of your gate with him.

That is the real succession problem in this industry, and almost nobody is planning for it.

The numbers nobody puts together

India has roughly 22,000 packaging units, of which about 85% are small and medium enterprises. The sector directly employs around half a million people, and supports perhaps another 1.5 million indirectly.

Now set that against the training infrastructure. The Indian Institute of Packaging, the apex body under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, has been running since 1966. It is a serious institution doing good work. It operates from six centres.

Six centres. Twenty-two thousand units.

Whatever the precise intake, the structural point is unavoidable: formal packaging education in this country was never built at the scale the industry actually operates at. It produces technologists for the large organised players. It was never going to staff the other twenty-one thousand units, and it has not.

So those units train their own people. By apprenticeship. On live material, on running machines, during production.

Why this is getting worse, not better

India consumes about 16 kg of packaging per person per year. China is around 50. Germany 45. The United States 115.

Read that as a forecast rather than a statistic. Nobody seriously believes India stays at 16. Every projection for this sector assumes the gap closes, which means more lines, more shifts, more plants — and a great deal more people who need to know things.

At the same time the work is getting harder. Structures that were three layers are now five. Solvent-based is moving to solventless. Recycled content mandates are rising year on year, and running recyclate changes how a laminate behaves. Food safety documentation that nobody asked for in 2010 is now a condition of supply.

More plants, harder work, and a knowledge-transfer system that depends on a nineteen-year apprenticeship nobody has time for any more.

What it actually costs you

The cost does not appear in your books with a label on it. It shows up as:

• The shift that ran 400 kg of film before anyone noticed the treatment had dropped
• The customer complaint about seal failure that took three weeks to trace
• The new supervisor who re-learns, by scrapping material, something your retiring operator could have told him in one sentence
• The quotation priced on a structure that was never going to run properly on your machine

Every one of those is a knowledge gap being paid for in material. Most converters I talk to can name two or three from the last quarter without thinking hard.

The honest problem with the obvious solution

“Send them for training” is the obvious answer, and it mostly does not happen. A two-year post-graduate diploma is not an option for a line supervisor with a family. A three-month residential course means losing him for three months. Even a two-day programme in Mumbai costs travel, hotel, and a man off the floor.

So the training that actually reaches most people in this industry has to meet three conditions. It has to be short enough to do between shifts. It has to be on a phone, because that is the device everyone has. And it has to be specific to packaging, not generic manufacturing content.

That is why we put quizzes and short courses on GPN rather than building a curriculum. The format is deliberately small — a few questions on substrate selection, on lamination defects, on barrier properties, on what a COF value actually tells you — that a supervisor can work through in ten minutes while a job is running.

It is not a substitute for a packaging technologist. Nobody should pretend it is. What it does is make the basic vocabulary of this industry testable, so you can find out what your people actually know rather than assuming.

That turns out to be the useful part. Most plant owners have never checked. They assume the senior operator has passed it on, and he assumes the junior picked it up by watching.

What to do this week

1. Name the single-point dependencies. Which processes in your plant have exactly one person who truly understands them? Write the list. It is usually shorter and more frightening than people expect.
2. Ask that person to write one page. Not a manual. One page on what he checks and why, for the thing only he can do. Pay him for the time if you must.
3. Test what your team knows. A short quiz on fundamentals will tell you more in ten minutes than a year of assuming.
4. Give the junior people something to work through. Ten minutes between jobs, consistently, beats a course nobody attends.
5. Decide who is being trained to replace your most critical operator — and tell him that is what is happening. People stay for that conversation.

The packaging industry in India spent four decades building machines. The next decade is going to be decided by who built people.

Related reading: The tax rule that turned your unpaid invoice into your customer’s problem.

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Sources: Brickwork Ratings, Packaging Industry in India (February 2025) — unit count, MSME share, employment and per-capita consumption figures; Indian Institute of Packaging, institutional profile.