Make in India to Atmanirbhar
Readers, I am not going to traverse the beaten path of, by now, the incontinent narrative on Atmanirbhar Bharat. Enough has been said and proclaimed. It may or may not be a discourse full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, the thought of Shakespeare, uttered by Macbeth. We will know in good time. In this post, however, I will try to bring in a simple, but hopefully, a pithy and meaningful message.
Let me get the déjà vu, the been there done that away. I will not talk about the PM’s economic package worth Rs 20 lakh crore or 10 per cent of GDP or in reality merely 3 lakh crores and so on. Time will tell how significant the package was and whether it indeed helped every section of the society including workers, farmers, middle class and industrial units through various sops and measures.
In an interview to ET, the new CII president Uday Kotak emphatically says getting growth back is non-negotiable and a
demand side push is needed and if that is done strongly, the trend of growth
month-by-month can arrive at a level close to normalisation before the end of
this year. Further growth will, in any case, require stronger push. Once again, even as we
do not see a strong push by the government, let us wait and watch.
Let us gloss
over the impassioned pitch by the government for Atmanirbhar Bharat
intertwined within the global platform with the spirit of Vishwa Kalyan and wonder whether it could actually altruistically
cater to its own and indeed the world aspirations. Whether our Yoga and manufacture
of medicines would make us a vanguard in global path to help mankind or we
remain what we were, a factory for inexpensive medicines whereas all the
R&D to develop new medicines would be done, as usual, in the west, or now-a-days,
even in China?
We will soon begin to see whether
the so called global opportunities that were or are staring at us actually boosted
for Indians to capture them so we will wait to make a judgment on that.
Specific to China and amidst all the hullabaloo, we have to wait and see how
our attempts to blank out China from our industrial and consumer space pan out;
these are early days. India has not been a favoured destination for global
investments because of several reasons and not many of them have changed for
the better. We
need to shed all semblance of a centralized command economy to let entrepreneurial innovative spirit be freed from bureaucratic
hurdles. It is about self-confidence & pride in not local brands per se but
local brands of value. Structural problems like cost of capital,
manufacturing eco-system and supply chain, corporate labour laws, some
permanence of policy and not frequent changes, infrastructure and skill levels
remain and we talk of sustained reforms to address these areas but will the
government walk the talk? The government does appear to be unapologetic about
privatization of PSUs, which is good, but do we see perceptible progress? We
wait and watch.
Industry has to do its bit;
more built-up of stories of, let’s say the one by Srinivas Kantheti, MD WheelsEMI. He has
written that while he had no quarrel with the discourse on the unfair
practices of China, he talked about an industry where China had been beaten by India, the
two wheeler segment. Yes, Indian industry has to rise to the challenge and
deliver the way Hero and Bajaj did but enough has been said about that already,
isn’t it?
We have spoken ad nauseam about lack of and therefore the requirement to develop skill sets among
our workers. I take you to an interesting interview of Tim Cook, the CEO of
Apple, at the Fortune Global Forum in 2017. He said that it was unthinkable for
any country to reach the level China had reached because they have acquired a level of extraordinary skills, an intersection of
craftsman skill as well as sophisticated robotics. Well, everyone is talking
about skilling of our workmen and we have to wait and see how meaningful our
actions are going to be in this area.
Everyone’s job is cut out.
But there is something which is missing or at least not come to the fore with
the same significance and purport. It is the spirit of innovation and creation,
a pride in products and technologies developed by Indian minds.
I have always said that Make in India has not really taken us far.
This model defines local content as the total value of items procured excluding
the domestic tax minus value of imported content including custom duties as a
proportion of the total value and if you are at 50% or more, there are sops in
government orders. Unfortunately, this is open to manipulation and even misuse.
USA also has an equivalent Buy America
policy and all overseas manufacturers have to go through a stringent audit
verification at component level. Our audit, if at all, is perfunctory.
But that’s not the point. True
Make in India must have a makeover.
It must envisage and encourage development of concepts and designs as an
essential, else we remain an importer of technology or a leased manufacturing
space. I can tell you of umpteen appalling instances of lack of government and
corporate support for new home-grown technologies and products. If we don't
develop our own, we will continue to hop back to where we were, every fifteen
years. There are a million minds in India, if I may say so, with a bee in their
bonnets with new ideas, and I use it in a positive sense, but institutional
support prevents us seeing these dreams turn into a vision followed by action
and fruition.
What should we take pride
in? We have developed a fighter aircraft, the ill-fated Tejas, after nearly 35
years of struggle. I am no one to defend the mess created by HAL and the Air
Force in the delays. But today, a handful have been deployed and further orders
would need significant tinkering. I hope it turns out to be really gainful. Yet,
as it is, it is our own and a matter of national pride. But, national pride sprung
out recently in all its stupid elation and posturing with the landing of the
first batch of Rafale aircrafts at Ambala. All the news channels went gaga over
it. The refrain on national channels was, “Rafale
aaya, Cheen tharraya. Goodness! How juvenile a discourse can get? As if the
achievement matched that of our Chandrayan or Mangalyan successes or perhaps
even more. I am not saying even for one minute that Rafale aircrafts should not
have been purchase. Sure they should have been purchased and this government
did show decisiveness in procuring them. But these aircrafts have been shopped,
not developed by us.
Talk about all the chest-thumping
and back-slapping about manufacture of ventilators, PPEs and masks in large
numbers. Does that make us great innovators or manufacturers? We cannot set our sights so low that for a
country of our size, such marginal feats be celebrated as great achievements. I
am neither underplaying this accomplishment not am I the devil’s advocate but
we have to guard against becoming a victim of our own rhetoric and buzzwords. Do we want to limit our manufacturing competence in screw-driver technology from imported SKD/CKD kits under license
production, with almost no value addition in terms of design, technology or
process engineering?
We are where Japan
was in the fifties or China in the nineties? And it’s time to take that bull by
the horn and invest in development of our own products and technologies. My
cliché now-a-days is that Transfer of Technology (ToT) contracts can take us
only so far. Our acquisition of technologies from developed nations was needed
for us to learn and assimilate the latest trends in product design and
technologies. But ToT is, in reality, an oxymoron. Because technology is much
more than a set of documents, drawings, specifications, test plans, vendor
qualification protocol etc., classroom training and meetings to make it
amenable to any transfer. Technology is a creation. It lives in the mind and
heart of the creator. This ToT business has gone on for too long, it has now
become a crutch, an albatross around our neck, making us a slave of superior
intelligence. But our intelligence would remain inferior unless we mutate it to
the next level and nurture it. It is time now to unleash the creator in us. I
am not advocating the foolishness to tread in areas where we are still miles
behind, I am talking of areas where we can tread and succeed.
We must
act. Development of our own products and technology, has to be the soul of self-reliance in long term.
Industry and similar institutions should do their bit. But the primary role in
this effort has be that of the government. Only the government
can exploit large projects and the attendant huge investments to drive
indigenous effort, private entities with their own bottom lines can only do so
much. Only large projects and huge investments can drive indigenous effort. One example, rolling stock, or simply said, development of trains,
in China. After inviting all world majors to set up shop, they
learnt the technology, even refined it and they now challenge these majors. We
have also invested heavily in Metro and even Indian Railways trains but we manufacture
either 25 year old technology coaches or current technology trains with low-end
assembling. India has gone for massive investments in renewable energy sector
with solar installations. But why is it that all solar installation equipment,
be it panels, electronics and the Lithium Iron batteries are sourced almost
entirely from China? Talk
of Battery Buses for which there is a great push but the heart of the
technology, the electronics and controls, apart from the batteries, are all
imported. There are other areas of
government spend which have unnecessarily been made holy cows with practically
no growth of home-grown technologies
The government must support the industry morally and
financially, through subsidies and incentives and more than that, preferential orders.
Subsidies and incentives like cheap land, specially-sourced raw materials,
export facilitation, even enabling government manpower from laboratories and
design centres. And ordering with clear reference to Indian companies who
believe in R&D. Government has to underwrite
the risks for emerging companies and believe me, there are many straining at
their leash for the government to embolden them to experiment and flourish. I quote the poet Ali Sardar Jafri who covered it well in
some other reference:
Naya
chashma hai patthar ke shigafon se ubalne ko,
Zamana kis
qadar betaab hai
karvat badalne ko
(A new stream is bursting
forth to boil from the stones, the world here is passionately impatient to turn
a new leaf.)
We
have ISRO and DRDO which worked under a regime of denial of technology by
developed nations and but freed from stifling bureaucracy and restrictions,
they gave us Chandrayaan, Mangalyaan and missiles. We need wide replication
with a sense of purpose and I express it here poetically:
Ab falaq yun kare ki sach ye khwab ho jaaye
Barson ka
mera shafaq ab aaftab ho jaaye
(Let the
sky make this dream come true and after years of twilight, let the sun shine)
This is not a matter
of dimagh alone, it is a matter of dil, dimagh aur jigar; dimagh for talent & skill, dil for passion & intensity and jigar for boldness & chutzpah. With the
support of the government, India can develop thousands of home-grown technologies
in a matter of years and that is what would make us truly atmanirbhar.
...
References:
The entire article of Srinivas
Kantheti can be accessed at:
The
full interview with Tim Cook can be accessed on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ng8xQ-SNGc
In the recovery phase, we must have the demand side push
coming in: CII President
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/finance/in-the-recovery-phase-we-must-have-the-demand-side-push-coming-in-cii-president/articleshow/76254246.cms?from=mdr
Pride of India, Tejas
fighter jet finally takes to the skies
Well written and presented.Why did you not use the example of Train 18 to indicate how current Indian system retards innovation and is unable to cash in on new technology.
ReplyDeleteSimply because it is not about trying to beat my own drum for the country and policymakers to awake to our potential! Hope good sense prevails
ReplyDelete