Challenges before Indian Industry: against the backdrop of ‘Make-In-India’ campaign. ================================================
-- Dr. M. S. Patel ============
In September last year, government launched the ‘Make-In-India’ campaign revealing the intention to strengthen domestic manufacturing base. Prosperity of any nation, whether in terms of GDP growth or expressed simply as per capita income, is directly proportional to a nation’s skill to convert available raw materials into marketable finished goods with high efficiency. For this, it requires a strong manufacturing base with peripheral support of basic utilities, energy, skilled manpower, infrastructure, and so on. So the campaign as such is a welcome step, but government’s capacity and boldness to translate this into ground realities with reference to bureaucratic policies will decide its fate over a time to come. Some indications are already available on its dedicated website: http://www.makeinindia.com/ . Debashis Basu, in his article: ‘Make in India - beyond the slogan', describes three major fronts needing urgent attention - Human resource, Real Estate and Capital. The fourth one he forgets to mention, even more important than these three, is uninterrupted supply of energy. This of course opens up a vast area of unlimited opportunities, as we shall see later on. [ http://www.businessstandard.com/article/opinion/debashis-basu-make-in-india-beyond-the-slogan-114121400577_1.html ]. Shared here are a few thoughts with intention to indicate some bright opportunities disguised under formidable challenges. My purpose will be served even if only a thought process is invoked in some young entrepreneurs, sawing seeds for a new venture into entirely a non-traditional direction.
Keeping Customer in Focus: After successful commercialization and widespread popularity of Edison’s lamp, electric lighting became so cheap, it was said then that only a fool or an extravagant rich could afford to burn candles for lighting. But at the beginning of his career, the same genius inventor, had suffered an unexpected failure of his automatic vote-tally system (a kind of EVM, Electronic Voting Machine of those days), forcing him to take a tough decision, as Nathan Furr writes in Forbes magazine: “Edison reframed all his future efforts with one simple phrase, ‘I never want to build something that nobody wants to buy’ ”. Rather than letting the failure destroy him, Edison recovered and discovered two very important principles that made him one of the most famous serial innovators of all time. Both these principles focus on “..... What Customers Will Buy” [Read more of this interesting article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanfurr/2011/06/09/how-failure-taught-edison-to-repeatedly-innovate/ So, customer is the clue and market is the driving force for any industry. First question to be answered here is why a customer should buy my product, when he has other multiple choices from domestic as well as international suppliers? Consistent quality, reliability, cost-effectiveness and unbroken supply chain are but a few of the factors that play a major role in deciding the customer base. Necessity is the mother of invention. To maintain the competitive edge and to continually enhance customer satisfaction, one has to resort to a strong R&D base. It is the realm of research and innovation that provides tailor-made solutions specific to each individual need of the product portfolio.