Export Experience: Make in India starts bearing fruits

By OEM Update Editorial February 10, 2017 3:27 pm IST

Make in India, the brainchild of Prime Minister Modi was set to make a great impact on the manufacturing sector. We speak to some of the industry experts to gauge their experiences when it comes to exports post ‘Make in India’.

India is known for its services exports, however many doubt its ability to export manufactures and that is the perception which Prime Minister Narendra Modi plans to change.

The Prime Minister rolled out a red carpet to industrialists, both domestic and international, inviting them to ‘Make in India’, a manufacturing hub that will help boost jobs and growth. The campaign is aimed at making India a manufacturing hub.

Nitin Wakode, Associate Vice President PSG, Onward Technologies Ltd feels that the reason why many industries have become dynamic is the growing global competition. He says, “India being one of the largest consumer markets has always been a growth centre. The positive atmosphere generated due to the ‘Make in India’ campaign has had a dramatic effect on the growth. It is a wonderful step from the government to promote this initiative which has inducted confidence of ease of business in global investor community. Since companies like Ford, GE, GM, John Deere, Caterpillar and many others are investing heavily on machine tools for their export production.”

He also adds, “Since last couple of decades Indian machine tool industry has transformed substantially due to IMTMA and industry partners. Not only engineering but other consumer durables, food, chemical, pharmaceutical, healthcare exports need machine tools for die/mould, processing machineries. Every effort must be dynamic and continual we expect Make in India to happen every year. IMTMA efforts are also appreciable IMTEX itself drive substantial business for Indian industry. The metal cutting industry which constitutes of the machine tool and cutting tool can see tremendous growth potential. This is the industry which is said to be backbone as well as measure of industrial growth.”

Maulik Patel, Executive Director, Sahajanand Laser Technology Ltd says, “India has been gradually advancing in steel sector since last couple of years. Since steel is amongst highly utilised metal, the increase of its demand will bring huge benefit for metal forming industry.” He further says, “Amidst the favourable conditions started making way for metal forming tool industry, the Indian government gave the progress much needed momentum by ‘Make in India’ initiative. What the campaign has been essentially doing is distributing the progress in more balancing way. Prior to the aforementioned program, the metal shaping sector was facing the inharmonious growth and the gap amongst the high performing sections and low performing sections were tremendously high. Hence, in larger picture it used to hamper the growth of entire sector.”

According to Patel, the focus of the ‘Make in India’ campaign is going to be the proliferation of small to medium size industries and that involves substantial amount of segments and sub segments of the metal forming industry. It reflects that, the drive is all set to revolutionize the face of all the Indian industry as, the government has determined to transform the ecosystem across the industry right from small extending to big enterprises.

Sharing the facts in numbers, Patel says, “When we measure this into numbers, currently, Indian auto part industry is excellently growing with a CAGR of 11 per cent. If we go by the current statistics, India will be the 4th highest steel manufacturer in the world by 2020. The automobile sector is also advancing considerably with 7.1 per cent contribution to the GDP. The construction industry is also in full speed. It is earning the 2nd highest flow of FDI and improvising the infrastructure in the country, as both the industries are closely connected.”

Conclusion
‘Make in India’ in a way creates a policy framework to ease foreign investment, ease of business and management of intellectual property. This helps industries to establish their manufacturing bases in India. With the campaigns like these, most of the industrialists in the machine sector seem to be satisfied with the growing investments and increase in the sales. However, the story would be complete if Make in India can eventually evolve into Make for India (and the rest of the world) by addressing demands of the Indian marketplace.