A Plan for Us to Create a Globally Competitive Industrial Sector

Context: India must have the imagination and will to work to a clear long-term plan. Following ideas can form a part of the focussed long term strategy.

• Wide dissemination of information: Policymakers, businessmen, and entrepreneurs need information about our dependence on Chinese imports.

• Data could be crowdsourced in a specified format by a government portal.
• Price comparison, domestic alternative, and tax advantages should be widely disseminated.

• Create a large commodities market: China’s Yiwu International Trade City (About 65% of the world’s Christmas products are bought at Yiwu.)

• Inviting foreign firms to take part in the India trading market and stimulating them to accelerate India’s manufacturing. 

• Focusing on capital inputs manufacturing: India currently doesn’t have too many companies that make machines at scale.

• India can boost manufacturing in motors, switches, belt drives and machines of all sorts following the same model as Yiwu’s.
• Rope in IIT and NIT students to team up with their ITI peers to build new machines.
• Begin by reverse engineering and improving on the imported machines.

• Ramp up the engineering seats: Just three US universities, all of them ranked higher than any IIT for CSE by Times Higher Education, equal the number of CSE students in our 23 IITs.
• Improve the quality of education: Most of our IIT and NIT students are brilliant at the theory and novel ideas, but few can build a physical machine or write a single code.

• Focus on hands-on skillset to create innovative machines and not just but from China. 
• Introduce courses on artificial intelligence and advanced computing to create a manpower pool of future technologies.
• It is time to get out of the comfort zone of ivory-tower concepts like student-teacher ratio and learn how to scale up from institutes abroad to fulfill the country’s needs.