Analysing the barriers in Indian stone crushing industries: an ISM and fuzzy AHP approach

In an emerging economy like India, stone crushing industry for construction aggregates play a vital role for employment and economy. These industries are usually small scale and labour intensive in nature. Stone mining and crushing have a considerable impact on the biological resources as well as socio economic setting of local population. In this context, therefore, identifying and ranking the barriers that affect stone crushing operations becomes important. The present research attempts to explore various factors affecting stone crushing operations and their interactions. Interpretive structural modelling (ISM) is employed in this research to extract the interrelationships among the identified barriers and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (F-AHP) applied to rank the barriers. This study can be taken as a reference by the decision makers while deciding the hierarchy of action necessary for effective operations of stone crushing units.