To take India on a high and sustainable growth rates, the government and the private sector have to work collaboratively. To facilitate this partnership NITI Aayog organised an interactive two-day conference in the month of August, 2017, called the”Champions of Change”. The effort aims to foster conversations between the private sector and the government and includes the Prime Minister.
Taking this forward, top CEOs from different sectors of industry deliberated over six different key themes, ie., A New India by 2022, Make in India, Cities of Tomorrow, World Class Infrastructure, Doubling Farmer Incomes and Fixing Finance; Reforming the Financial Sector
Vinod Sharma, Managing Director, Deki Electronics, was a member of the group that focused on “Make In India”. His presentation focused on the challenge of tackling the 4 Cs – Cost, Complexity, Corruption and Culture – that are holding back the rise of manufacturing in India.
Four main focus areas emerged on which the government will work as enabler and the private sector as implementation agent. The areas are – conducive business environment (land, labour, capital and ease of doing business), logistics and infrastructure, MSMEs and industry 4.0 (innovation and disruptive technologies)
In a conversation with Electronics Bazaar, Vinod Sharma, shares his views on the same.
EB) Please explain to us how the govt & private collaboration is going to work with respect to Deki’s participation?
Mr. Modi told us that he is trying to create ‘champions of change’ in people like us so that we also spread the message of development of India’s manufacturing scenario as a household thing. If everyone gets into promoting this, then only this dream will become a reality. It is good to spread the message and become the messenger but at the same time there are a lot of things that needs to be done both by the government as well as the private sectors in order to achieve our aspirations.
EB) Kindly enlighten us about Deki’s action plan for tackling the 4C’s to uplift the Indian manufacturing scenario
Honestly these 4C’s cannot be handled by any enterprise on their own. For example, the cost of energy is very high. In Noida the quality of power is not much reliable and therefore every factory needs to have a separate power backup for running the plants. Then there comes the generators and the UPS which needs to run nearly for 24 hours. So if you put in the whole cost of the energy generation, it is pretty high. A guy in China is paying 5 rupees/ per unit for power to the energy authority. He does not even need any power backup. Now in India we officially get power for rupees 8/per unit but my actual cost is amounting upto rupees 14/per unit which includes the cost for power backups, generators etc.
EB) What challenges do you anticipate in your road-map and how do you plan to overcome them?
If you ask why the ecosystem is not working efficiently, I would say that we did not have a proper ecosystem only so long. Even if I take into consideration that there was any ecosystem, the vision was clearly missing. India is a democratic country and thereby everyone has the right to make anything they want. For example the mobile sector, the journey was streamlined i.e, we will manufacture mobiles in India and also promote the same so that companies outside India also feels motivated to invest in India. Now if we have an agenda so clearly chalked out, then the industries also gets chance to think about the same and act accordingly
EB) Can you give us some estimates for the initiative and what are the area wise investment?
In my opinion this initiative is basically to get the enablers counted. Talking about the root cause as to why ‘Make in India’ is not being executed at a high pace is that we have raised the manufacturing by 15 – 16 percent but we want to raise it up to 25 percent by 2022. In this process we intend to create a lot of jobs.
By Baishakhi Dutta
