A year from now, the ‘Make in India’ programme should have oriented government policies in a direction that would reverse the trend of India’s jobless growth. For this to happen, unlearning and relearning has to take place across the board, within the government and public policy domain as well as in the corporate sector, with the help of activists, civil society organisations, educationists and skill providers.
Since the programme chiefly has to do with manufacturing, it is important to see what led us to a situation where many of our engineers and technicians had to abandon hopes of finding employment in manufacturing. A cursory look at the data available from official sources makes it clear that manufacturing has been beating a retreat in our country and its share in the gross domestic product has remained abysmal. A bunch of circumstances created this situation and also created, at least in some quarters, a dangerous attitude that began to view India as a post-industrial economy.
However important the emergence and rapid growth of the tertiary sector may be, a healthy manufacturing sector is essential for a dynamic economy that can not only provide jobs to the unemployed but also improve the rural economy by moving under-employed manpower out of agriculture. This is a truth ‘universally accepted’, but we have had a slew of policies that has led to an ecosystem hostile to manufacturing.
‘Make in India’ will need a whole year to right the past wrongs. I would expect the following aspects of the programme to receive the required attention. The aspects are enhancement of competitiveness, skills and strategies to create jobs in several leading sectors such as automobiles, electronics, biotechnology, food processing, information technology, pharmaceuticals, renewable energy, oil and gas, roads and highways, ports and so on.
The strategy should entail a major push to infrastructure — speeding up execution and clearing backlog; new policies to support small and medium enterprises; steps to facilitate doing business — buying land, a clear tax regime and labour laws; foreign direct investment issues and major investments in technology and innovation, including thorough development of smart cities, manufacturing zones, technological corridors and industrial clusters.
If the strategy outlined above is accompanied by attitudinal changes in how India relates to investors — not as a permit issuing authority, but as a true partner — one should see a lot of improvements in governance, in terms of transparency, accountability as well as jettisoning of time-consuming and dysfunctional procedures.
It is clear that each of the focus areas in this campaign requires close attention as each of them is a means to the final end — emergence of India as a strong economy in which every citizen can aspire for a better future. The website defines the programme as a national programme, designed to facilitate investment, foster innovation, enhance skill development, protect intellectual property (IP) and build best-in-class manufacturing infrastructure.
For facilitation of investment, massive changes will be required in not only pre-investment-decision procedures but also in post-investment handholding and problem solving, for which systems will have to be put in place. What is also imperative is to pay close attention to the needs of local entrepreneurs, so India remains their preferred investment destination.
For investors, current procedures are complex and onerous. These need to be done away with, but at the same time the desired outcomes —backward and forward linkages, technology transfer (with regard to FDI) and job creation — will take place only through a new mindset and the translation of this mindset into a positive set of facilitative practices.
Skill development has been the watchword for some years now. This is another world in which government initiatives and funding have played a role along with public-private cooperation. Now, changes are in the offing. Translation of the vision of a skilled India into reality needs legal changes as well. For instance, the law relating to apprenticeship. India also needs to consider adoption of successful models of private sector involvement such as the dual vocational training system of Germany, Switzerland, Austria, etc. The campaign also needs to look at the re-skilling needs of workers.
Both quality and numbers are important. We need to ask questions — will more of secondary school students remain in school if they are taught vocational skills? Recent ILO research indicates that countries which manifest a low proportion of students in secondary education have a greater problem in creating a broad industrial base. So will this approach prevent the premature entry of secondary school students into the world of work?
There are other issues as well. Will the quality of the training we impart make it unnecessary for people to bring in technicians from other countries? Will our traditional skills be nurtured and protected? There are many worlds waiting to collide on these issues. So how do we encompass the reality of India with regard to its existing and potential workforce?
Linkages between schooling and vocational training have been attempted in the past, but these have been sub-optimal given India’s vast human resource — India’s major source of potential wealth and competitiveness. They are as important as the goal of building the best-in-class manufacturing infrastructure. Swaminathan A. Aiyar, who writes for The Economic Times, says the PPP experiment is in pieces. The PPP paradigm needs a change. Financing of infrastructure and the present load of non-performing assets on state-run banks are issues that one would expect to have been confronted. Issues relating to IP are equally complex and will need really close attention.
Thus one year down the line, one would expect the myriad pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to have been identified. Accompanying governance changes would represent a mindset change that will respect outputs and nurture success.
