Make in India

Modi is making all the right moves. But whether they have the desired impact in the long run is something that only time will tell.

While, many in the media may accuse him of tokenisms or frivolous symbolisms, the fact is, in a large and diverse country like ours, with a lose federal structure, a hide bound caste structure and a labyrinthine bureaucracy, it is indeed difficult to cause change by merely legislating.

To bring in an element of permanence and sustainability to change, and to guarantee stability, it is imperative that attitudes also change, and the fastest way to change them is by example from the top, than wait for momentum to build from the bottom. And when you attempt to ensure change from the top, tokenism and demagoguery are few of the tools that transitional leaders resort to, to affect it.  And that is exactly what Modi probably aiming to do.

When tokenism is deployed at the international stage, it is called diplomacy, and that is a far more acceptable term than tokenism, with far lesser negative connotation also than the latter.

The invite to Sharif, a democratically elected head of a perennially hostile neighbor, much to dismay of the Pakistani army, or his leaning toward Japan, or his invitation to Obama for the Republic Day 2015, are clearly all moves, which are symptomatic of a nitijya none less than Kautilya himself.

I am also particularly enamored by his focus on “make in India”. If someone had raised this slogal 30 years ago, India would not have missed the first phase of growth that so many of her smaller east Asian neighbors witnessed.

It was just 300 years ago, when the Bird of Gold, as India was metaphorically referred to for several centuries before the Ganges was sponged to be squeezed on Thames, under the English Yoke, it was a hub of manufacturing and also of trading. It was also the seat of learning for centuries and anyone desiring higher education would come to the Indian learning centers for seeking it. What was India’s stated prowess in manufacturing then is what is today called handicrafts now. Which makes it clear, while India continued to manufacture what it did, the machines took over, produced more, cheaper and faster, and about better only the connoisseurs could care. And India lost to Europe in the Industrial or machine revolution. This revolution also included mechanization of warfare. Other than Tipu Sultan, who inherited the zeal to mordernize his army from his father Haider, I don’t think, any ruler looked at modernizing the army.

CONTRIBUTION TO GLOBAL GDP IN PCT TERMS

	1700	1993	2003	2013
USA	NIL	26.5	25.6	23.9
CHINA	23	2.3	6.8	8.5
GERMANUY,UK, FRANCE, ITALY	6	21.6	17.7	16.7
JAPAN	6	12.2	8.5	8.2
INDIA	26	1.2	2.2	2.5

Till the mid 60s, India was ahead of China in most growth parameters.

Over the last 60 years of Congress rule, the Chinese progress has numbed the world, while Indian growth rates wallowed at the Hindu Rate of Growth and India chose to look askance, obsessing about the Nehruvian dynastic democracy than

Till the mid nineties, the global manufacturing contribution of the world was split quite uniformly between some regional blocks like USA constituting 25 pct, EU top 4 (Germany, France, UK and Italy) 25 pct and Japan, China and India also contributing 25 pct.

From the mid nineties to 2013, while the contribution of India to global manufacturing increased two fold from 0.9 pct to 2.0 pct; that of China grew 8 fold from 3 pct to 24 pct. China became the factory to the world, and India bystander and was not even an also ran.

Contribution to Global Manufacturing in Pct Terms

	1700	1993	2003	2013
USA	NIL	24.4		23.9
CHINA	23	3.1	17.6	24
GERMANUY,UK, FRANCE, ITALY	6	24.1	17.9	14.9
JAPAN	6	20.2	9.6	7.3
INDIA	26	0.9	2.2	2.0

India actually leaped to the services phase without passing through the manufacturing phase. Just like India leapt to the mobile telephony phase without passing through the fixed telephony phase.