'Make in India’? Really??

The new Modi government has embarked upon much needed ‘Make in India’ program recently. The aim is to establish India as a credible and high quality supplier of finished goods to the countries worldwide. Today, India is known for its talent and expertise in IT and ITES industries. But in most of the other sectors, India is significantly behind other countries such as China, Taiwan, Korea, Brazil and even Bangladesh.

The government is aiming to unleash major reforms to ease the norms of doing business in India, simplify rules and regulations, build skilled workforce that can be tapped into, to scale up the businesses. This is really good news!

However, there is one thing still missing.

Do Indians really believe in ‘Make in India’ (MII) philosophy??

Making MII work will require employee to put customer satisfaction ahead of everything. It means despite all constraints, stretching oneself & the team to meet the customer requirements – consistently and proactively. And here lies the challenge.

Here is a simple ‘Can you Make In India’ test involving day to day examples:

1. Delivering an order to the customer requires working on a festival holiday. Will an Indian employee work on a festival holiday?
2. Customer is not happy with quality of the product supplied (too many complaints). Will an Indian employee proactively come up with suggestions to solve the quality issues?
3. A particular production section is facing absenteeism issues. Will employees rotate work stations to ensure that customer requirements are met?
4. Do Indian employees follow 100% safety protocols (PPEs, work permits etc.) on their own or do they require constant vigil & supervision?
5. Are the internal problems in the company solved through discussion or by stopping / reducing the work on lines?
6. On a production line, will an employee allow a defective piece go to the next work station?
7. Does the employee constantly chase the company to continuously learn new skills and techniques?

Admittedly, there would be mixed responses to these questions.

All the manufacturing businesses make their choices on manufacturing locations based on ‘work culture’ that is prevalent in various countries. There are several examples such as Nokia, Apple etc. that have opted out of India because they were not convinced about the conducive work culture here.

Just like ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’, ‘Make in India’ has to start with oneself. It has to start with keeping the customer at the centre stage of everything that we do in the company.