Kopi Time E134 - Vasuki Shastry on India’s Manufacturing Future

Vasuki Shastry, Senior Advisor at Gatehouse Advisory Partners, returns to Kopi Time to talk about the decade-old “Make in India” initiative. From Production Linked Incentives (PLI) to splashy marketing campaigns, this has been a signature initiative by the Indian government under Prime Minister Modi. What has been the accomplishment of this effort to usher in a new era of manufacturing in India? Vasuki’s report card is blunt—"it has been a qualified failure.” We go through the data on investment, job creation, technology transfer, and competition to assess his claim. We also discuss India’s complex regional heterogeneity, centre-state relationship, women’s participation in the labour force, the ultra-competitiveness of China, the difficulty—and perhaps the futility—of building an entire home-grown electronics supply chain, and the pull from emerging manufacturing powerhouses like Vietnam. Vasuki would like to see three key improvements ahead to convince him that manufacturing value added would rise substantially in the coming years—(i) a level playing field for businesses, with no perception of favouritism, (ii) stability of regulation, particularly tax laws, and (iii) political cohesion between the states and centre. He may not be impressed with Make in India so far, but Vasuki sees it as “an honourable aspiration to retain.” 

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