Made in India

What will come to your mind, when you hear “Made in India ”? A voice of Alisha Chinoy’s “Made in India ……” from her popular musical album! Right?

But here I am talking about a symposium on emerging Indian competitiveness. Mr. Subir Roy has written an interesting book “Made in India – A Story of Emerging Competitiveness” I attended its book opening ceremony with my friend on pleasant Saturday evening 9^th April 2005 at CrossWord, Bangalore . Interested? Then keep on reading.

Let me first introduced the distinguished member of the panel. They were representatives of all major sectors.

• Mr. G. Gurucharn - IAS officer from policy making.

• Mr. Subroto Bagchi from MindTree and Mr. Nadan Nilekani from Infosys – IT sector. Mr Prakash Gurbaxani, from Transworks – ITES sector. 

• Mr. Harish Bijoor from Harish Bijoor Consultants – Service sector.

• Mr. Ravi Uppal from ABB India – manufacturing sector and

• off course, the author Mr. Subir Roy. :)

The discussion was really interesting. All these members vocally and dynamically presented their view about India and its competitiveness. Subir Roy was taking notes, through out the discussion.

Nadan Nilekani emphasized on human capital. “All CEOs are quality conscious and very confident for global competitiveness…” He also mentioned importance of VAT (Value Added Tax).

Prakas Gurbaxani made a short speech. He mainly emphasized opportunity in food processing and garment export. He reminded that our Bangalore is also important for garment exports.

Ravi Uppal mentioned that we are forgetting importance of secondary sector -manufacturing while we stress too much on services.

G. Gurucharan IAS officer, he was a bit pessimistic. “Whenever we talk about India ’s competitiveness, we all remember only about economic reform started 15 years back in 1991. Bangalore – IT hub and other industrial areas are like islands of excellence…”  (We all know, Strategy guru Dr. C. K. Prahald introduced this word “islands of Excellence”) G. Gurucharan reminded audience about states like Bihar and Zarkhand. “Central government as well as state government both have to do so many things. Combined efforts by Industry and Government will be more effective. Here, at India , government policy makes one step forward and two steps backward. Our industries need to become first nationally competitive in the unified national market, before being globally competitive. …”

Subrota Bagchi informed that the author himself has nagging sense about this book may become obsolete very soon. “Till now, we have always studied India in flashback. We talked about Naheru, Gandhi, cultural heritage etc. First time, this book is written about real time. Even, the changes are so fast that real time is also not sufficient; we need book in fast forward mode …

“There is a major demographic shift in the whole world. We will have 4.5 to 6 billion teenagers in next 15 years in India and Pakistan together. So many unusual things will happen in business and corporate world…

“There was a time, when a senior executive of Sun Micro System, told me, he do not know where is India ? Sajan Jindal was reluctant to put seal of  ‘Made in India ’ on steal. Then slowly he unwillingly agreed. Today, Jindal industry is getting premium price with ‘Made in India ’ seal. The foreigners think that if Indians can write good quality software then to produce good quality steal is not a major deal for them…

“Suppose, without this IT booms, if I was at US, then maximum I would be a taxi driver there. Today, situation is such that, at US if any taxi driver is Indian, then people thinks that he must be a software engineer also!

“Maharshi Aurbindo mentioned that independent of India ’s independence, the country has its own destiny too. This book talks about this destiny.”

Harish Bijoor delivered a nice presentation with Power Point slides. He started his speech with Nadan’s comments to him, “Power corrupts people and Power Point corrupts everything in presentation if it does not work. :)

“This symposium panel members represents all major sectors like: IT, ITES, Manufacturing, Policy making. Biotech is missing. India is a brand since 1995. He always searches for Indian products at Indian stores in abroad. He mentioned some statistics. In 1970 46% contribution in GDP was from agriculture, in 2004 21% and in 2011 it will be 6%. His major concern was agriculture sector. Poor agriculture is like only one big black hole in Indian economy. As per him, we have two Indias . The Real India is 643000 villages where 70% of population stays. Other one is virtual India . Rural India is again divided in Developed India with 32 % of rural India and 43 million homes. Developing rural India has 90 million homes. If we want to increase per capita income from Rs. 480 in 2001 to Rs. 2000, then we must need to focus on agriculture…”

At last, he wished best of luck to the author that his book will have sales figure as good as OR better than, Alisha Chinoy’s Made in India album’s sales figure.

Then we had an interactive round of Question – Answer session.

Subir Roy replied that the primary focus of the book is Indian reader. Nadan Nilekeni shared his views about vision comes first, or vision developed as we proceed.

Someone asked about panel’s view on China v/s India .  Ravi Uppal describes that China do not have competitiveness in service sector. They are competitive in mass production and batch production. India is also moving for mass production. E.g. two-wheelers. India is much more competitive in software development and IT sector. China trains its people for global education and English. We have stable policy, supportive government, and disciplined people. Subroto Bagchi mentioned social aspects. In addition to IT and ITES, we need competitiveness in other sector also. Today BPO has very high turnover rate. In his days, civil engineering was at boom. So all parents were pushing their son/daughter to civil stream. Today parents have same craze for IT. Particularly in Andhra Pradesh, software engineer with H1B visa has very high value in marriage market. Nadan Nilekeni mentioned that we can apply IT for agriculture also. We developed software for supply chain optimization. Developing software is not difficult. We need a framework and competitive market. Our retails chain should demand such software. Supply chain optimization software should be pulled by market, instead of pushed by us. China is lacking in soft infrastructure. China does not have neither legal framework nor financial framework nor democracy. It is always easy to build road for India compare to build democracy for china.

At last one lady from the audience informed that, it is not only Alisha Chinoy. Recently, Intel also acknowledged the contribution of Indians in its progress. Patel inside and Intel Outside!!! Harish Bijoor agreed with her. He also mentioned that yes we are competitive; the issue is how to market that Patel. He explained his experiment with late Devang Mehta (NASSCOM) They purchased best cleaning broom and packed its nicely. It costs them Rs. 95 They could sale them at Rs. 1600 in US. They found broom very useful for cleaning. They also exported Gujarati BAANDHANIs.(a type of SARIs)

At last, Harish made an excellent summary. He compiled all the relevant points from all the speakers. Subir requested all to unwrap the book and just hold it for the benefits of photographers. We saw the books. It contains interesting cases, statically data with graphs about India . It costs Rs. 350 after special discount only for that occasion. Each copy had author’s autograph. Someone requested to Subroto for the autograph on the book. He politely denied that, only author can give autograph on the book.

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