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The ‘Make in India’ is a paradigm shift from the past two decades of Indian obsession with IT and ITeS services during which manufacturing industries were allowed to collapse. There appears to be a new found realization of the benefits of manufacturing A&D products in India for home consumption rather than import them.

There is an urgent need to cut unnecessary costs that hinder Indian businesses. PM Narendra Modi has been travelling far and wide to invite foreign companies to invest and ‘Make in India’ with an assurance that doing business in India is going to be made far easier than it has been so far.

If India is to match China in both technology and scale, many bottlenecks will have to be removed. The idea of ‘Make in India’ is not just about internal development, but also effectively countering threats from the outside. In terms of both geography and potential, India’s biggest competitor today is China.

Recently, a German manufacturer refused to manufacture in India because he wasn’t convinced of Indian ability to meet his quality standards. He compared a simple switch board that was fixed crooked at an Indian public office to a German one that was perfectly in place. A UK based designer working with Indian textiles recently refused to source his products locally from Indian weavers due to lack of quality.

Electronics City Industrial Township Authority has overcome many challenges, but there are still a few left. Historically, industrial estates have been set up in suburbs and areas distant from residential populations and, therefore, have always been governed by either a municipality or a village panchayat.

‘Make in India’ primarily focuses on manufacturing products in India. It is logical that this should include ‘Design in India’, ‘Innovate in India’, and ‘Support in India’. This therefore requires a holistic approach to not just managing HR, but creating HR right from schools, colleges and training institutions. Though this is a highly demanding task, there is no way we can avoid this. It is the only way that Make in India can succeed. Further, all these activities result in multiple areas of challenges as well as opportunities. The Governments (Central & State) too have their part to play in improving Industrial Relations and Labour laws, since manufacturing will certainly have to percolate to the smallest of MSMEs.

It was literally in disgust that G. Raj Narayan, founder and managing director of Radel Group, quit his job as an avionics engineer in the public sector to become an entrepreneur in electronics. That was way back in 1979. Three-and-a-half decades later, in 2015, Raj Narayan's company is now a very important supplier of test jigs and aerospace parts to Bengaluru-headquartered Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) that he had left after 10 years of work to pursue his passion.

How sincere is HAL when it makes such statements? I say this because this same intent has been repeated over the years ad nauseum without any action on the ground:

Let me narrate a recent incident to you, and then you can draw your own conclusions.

The private sector is being promoted as a likely saviour for all the current problems. While it is certainly true that this sector is more accountable and keen to prove its mettle, the lack of domain expertise even to the level of the DRDO/HAL is by itself likely to be a severe limitation. The private sector will therefore have to be supported and nurtured through an active assistance from the Navy/Air Force in upgrading their knowledge in specialised domains of defence equipment, be it armaments or navigation or communication or radars, none of which is encountered in commercial and industrial applications. This will once again have to be a hierarchical approach with a large private player creating a cluster of MSMEs as a supply chain with design and manufacturing skills.

The Indian Aerospace and defense manufacturing sector is at the cusp of change today, with the entry of large private players and strategic alliances, mergers and buy-outs being the order of the day. Aerospace giants like Airbus, United Technologies Corporation, Lockheed Martin and Dassault Aviation have been closely looking at the Indian market and companies they can partner with. As these companies look to build an ecosystem of Indian firms whom they can outsource their global work at competitive rates and through whom they can cater to the domestic market when orders from the Indian Armed Forces materialise, they can no longer afford to depend on the monopoly public sector giants or a few large players.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will today launch the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana to mark the World Youth Skills Day. The government has set a target of skilling 40.2 crore people by 2022, under the new National Policy for Skill Development, which will also be formally launched today.According to Union Skills Development & Entrepreneurship Minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy of the targeted population, 54 percent is in the agriculture sector.

Indian  SMEs to meet global standards

The nitty-gritties of starting a new venture in the fileds of Aerospace and defence.  

The role of government to encourage SMEs 

Impact of Make in India on Indian SMEs