Over the past few months, the world is going through an unprecedented situation, how long this situation persists is something no amount of intelligent human brain or technology is able to predict. But what we can absolutely predict is that the world will not be the same anymore. The biggest revival would be needed in the economic front, although everyone is predicting doomsday I have a contrarian view especially for India.
I haven't seen a biggest economic opportunity present itself to India and for it to evolve and stamp its authority as a super power. The general perception of India is that we lack innovation, the reason I feel we lack innovation is globalization. Although globalization has a lot of benefits one of the biggest demerits is collective and incremental innovation, what i mean to say is when there is a solution that is present to a problem you stop thinking and improvise on the solution. With his pandemic, more and more borders will get closed and localization will be the need of the hour.
The biggest challenge lies in whether India will be able to make use of the opportunity. The 3 key factors would be the government, the leaders or the entrepreneurs and the human capital. If we have to look at the sectors that would be attributing to India’s rise, they would be manufacturing, IT services, innovations and consumer goods.Right now , Electricity, Internet and Convenience has become the quintessential needs of a human being as opposed to just the Roti Kapda Makaan.
Never before have we seen the dependency of the other countries on India both in terms of supply and demand. Post this Pandemic, we would see a lot of countries struggle to come back on its limbs because they are either dependent for their materials (manufacturing) on China and their business on the USA and Europe. India being the second largest market in the world we can and absolutely should focus on being self sufficient. So how do we do it? This is where the government plays an important role in collecting the demand and supply within the country. Stronger policy push (Make in India) is needed to nudge the businesses to take hard calls and start looking within.
Manufacturing - Although we depend on China highly for manufacturing India is not far behind in revolutionizing and being self sufficient in manufacturing. Our current manufacturing infrastructure needs to start looking to produce more and more stuff that is needed by the Indian industries. This is where we need leaders who can motivate a lot of people to join the manufacturing revolution in India. Every person who is part of this revolution will have the same dignity as a software engineer sitting in an AC office.There should be economic parity to bridge the gap. Government needs to infuse capital and protect the industry via new labour laws which removes the fear for both the employers and the workers against all the anarchic burden of the older labour laws, they should be done away with.
IT Industry - IT services is the industry that helped the world stand up and take notice of India. This is the time where IT services have a huge potential for exponential growth, Although we need to depend on other countries for the business to flow. IT services should shred the cost factor being the only differentiator and take a new form where quality, efficiency, automation, innovation takes the center stage. This is the right time for us to make use of the employable human capital that India had exported to all the countries to be given the opportunity to help IT services reach a higher standard. A lot of Indians will come back due to the economic downturn and India needs to make use of this talent.
Manufacturing needs to be revolutionized by the big players as it needs a lot of machinery set up and land etc.
IT Industry needs to be reshaped by the new age entrepreneurs.
All in all, I see a huge potential for India to move towards becoming the economic superpower. It's all in our hands.
Key Mentions - Cari who is a good friend hosts the show and it actually triggered a lot of thoughts after the early morning walk https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/bharatvaarta/id1501417442?i=1000470493503
