Steps have to be taken to bring success to Make in India and generate pride over the ‘Made in India’ label
The Prime Minister’s initiative of Make in India has drawn a lot of attention in the recent past. Considering the current scenario of Indian economy and other factors, mixed reactions have poured in.
The focus is mainly to make India grow and become self-sufficient in all walks of life globally. In achieving the goal, the following step-by-step approach could fetch the desired results in the segments opened globally automobiles, defence manufacturing, food processing, leather, media and entertainment, etc.
The Make in India initiative provokes industrial houses worldwide to set up their ventures in India, creating infrastructure and job opportunities. This would encourage support to ‘Make for India’ in the sense that there is ultimately planned development framework for India, which would lead to quality production for the ‘Made in India’ label.
An in-depth study for the Make in India initiative has been carried out at IIT Delhi vis-à-vis taking forward the ‘Make for India’ perspective, which has lead, the authors to come to a conclusion via a survey, into the critical issues relating to sustainable manufacturing. The following enablers and barriers have to be given consideration before researchers and industry professionals join hands turning the dream initiative a success.
let’s look at the enablers. While lowering manufacturing cost involves managing the processes efficiently with minimum wastes generation; investment in innovation & technology is necessary to enhance the performance of processes by implementing advanced technological initiatives. Pressure from the market enables industries to satisfy the customer requirements considering the competitive scenario. Development in e-economy eliminates wasteful expenditure and middlemen phenomena using e-banking, dissemination of information through e-resources. Infrastructure facilities in the transportation sector require mandatory policies for carrying material and goods with reduced carbon emissions by promoting environmental norms.
Similarly, we need to highlight the possible reasons for critical barriers being important in both the groups, along with some suitable mitigation measures based on the interaction with researchers and industry professionals. Under the subject, lack of awareness of sustainability concepts, limited access to sustainable literature restricts the awareness of various concepts and techniques by which practitioners can implement sustainability. The solution to it can be suitable training workshops for practitioners, wherein problems faced by industry can be discussed and guidance provided for implementing sustainability. In addition to this, high initial costs of implementing the sustainable technology constrain the industry practitioners from investing, and waiting for longer duration to gain economic benefits makes it tougher for them. One important measure to curb this issue can be incentives by the Government in the form of tax rebate and financial and technical assistance to industries in implementing sustainable technologies. Industries should also make efforts to reduce cost of overwastes produced, and judiciously utilise resources such as energy, water, etc.
lack of support from senior leaders in implementing sustainability initiatives is another critical issue. In addition, the low availability of credit to industries due to high lending rates is a major bottleneck in the latter’s growth. The banking sector needs to come up with strategic funding schemes and evaluations. There is a need to achieve balance in production and distribution vis-à-vis renovation of ages old infrastructure and transmission lines to tackle the issue of power shortage while at the same time push the need to explore renewable sources of energy.
The growth of any nation depends mainly on two critical factors: Social and political will. The growth of Japan or China in the manufacturing sector has mainly been possible due to the strong presence of factors mentioned above. There is a need for huge restructuring of the system, only after which India can transition from Make in India to ‘Made in India’.
(The writer is a research scholar at IIT Delhi, working in the field of sustainable manufacturing)