India has followed a peculiar growth story over the years. India has seen high growth in the services sector. The government has been focusing on right from creating a single window facility for addressing investor concerns, identifying key manufacturing sectors, to creating a common platform to unite state governments, bureaucracy and corporate leaders.
India is blessed with a large labour pool and admirable levels of judicial transparency. We can leverage our territorial position to play a critical role in the global supply chains. Doubling up as a potential high consumption market can keep demand fluctuations in check as well as save up on the logistics costs.
I trust that our Industries need to strengthen on three fronts: cost (cheaper labour), quality (high skilled workforce), and supply chain (robust infrastructure), India can call itself the next global factory in future.
We shall emulate a ‘culture of manufacturing’ in India which is prevalent in a few countries such as Germany and South Korea. We need to attract our best brains and encourage them to join the manufacturing sector. We need to establish manufacturing linkages. The lack of infrastructure pushes up the logistics cost, which at 14 per cent of GDP is one of the highest globally.
The idea of promoting manufacturing is to ensure our demographic dividend finds meaningful employment. We launched the Make in India campaign to create employment and self-employment opportunities for our youth. We are working aggressively towards making India a Global Manufacturing Hub. We want the share of manufacturing in our GDP to go up to 25 per cent in the near future.
We are also aware that under the pressure of this campaign, the government machinery will be required to make a number of corrections on the policy front. There is an increasing need to stress on zero defect and zero effect manufacturing. We shall place high emphasis on energy efficiency, water re-cycling, waste to energy, clean India and river cleaning. These initiatives are directed at improving quality of life in cities and villages. These initiatives provide you additional avenues for investment in technologies, services and human resources.
Keshav C Das
Keshavcdas's Blog 