ANUJ KAPOOR took over his father’s booming auto parts business in 2012, hoping to elevate the company from selling to suppliers to selling directly to carmakers.

Seven years later, he’s had to lay off half his workers as drooping sales caused his profit to plummet by at least 80 percent.

Confidence in the Indian economy is giving way to uncertainty as growth in the labor-intensive manufacturing sector has come to a near standstill, braking to 0.6 percent in the last quarter from 12.1 percent in the same period a year earlier.

The economy grew at its slowest annual pace in six years in April-June at 5 percent. Many economists believe Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s signature economic policies are at least partly to blame.

A surprise demonetization in 2018 and the hasty rollout of a goods and services tax were dire blows to manufacturing, especially the auto industry. The fourth largest in the world, it’s a pillar of the Indian economy, contributing 7.5 percent to the country’s GDP.

The industry employs almost 37 million people and is on its way to shedding as many as a million jobs in the months ahead because of declining sales, according to the Auto Component Manufacturers Association of India.

Car deliveries in August dropped 41 percent from a year earlier, truck and bus sales fell 39 percent and motorcycle sales, a key indicator of the health of the economy in rural India, sank 22 percent.

No segment of the industry has been spared. India’s biggest carmaker, Maruti, has laid off 3,000 temporary employees and shut down two of its plants for two days.

Mid-size and small businesses, the backbone of much of India’s economy, are still suffering from the combined consequences of both reforms, economists say.

India’s unemployment rate was 3.4 percent when the GST was introduced in July 2017. As of the end of August, it was 8.4 percent, according to the Center for Monitoring the Indian Economy, a Mumbai-based research firm. (SD-Agencies)