Mumbai, April 17 -- The widening demand-supply gap in natural rubber in India, coupled with restrictions on import of the commodity, threatens to hit the tyre and non-tyre manufacturing sector badly. The drastic fall in production is particularly worrisome to rubber MSMEs who can hardly afford the high import duty and many have gone out of existence for want of raw material.

Going by the estimates made by the Rubber Board, the production-consumption gap for the 2018-19 fiscal stands at about 559,000 tonnes, as against 417,000 tonnes for the previous fiscal. With the expected big leap in demand for tyres and non-tyre rubber goods, the NR consumption in India is likely to surpass the projection of 1.2 million tonnes made by the Rubber Boar...