IIM Bangalore’s Public Policy Club hosts Dr. Ajai Chowdhry in a virtual webinar on ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat: Evaluating the India Opportunity’
Bangalore: The Public Policy Club (PPC) of students of the two-year MBA program at IIM Bangalore hosted a guest webinar on the topic, ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat: Evaluating the India Opportunity’, by distinguished speaker Dr. Ajai Chowdhry, on 25th November, 2020.
Indian Electronics Industry
Dr. Chowdhry offered a brief background of the electronics sector and his experience of working on several government task forces. He talked about several recommendations made to enhance the software and hardware industry, some of which did not see light of the day and many others which were implemented and are in process currently.
He emphasized the importance of setting up an incentive scheme for manufacturing electronics hardware in India. “Factors like the size of domestic market and skilled workforce work hugely in favour of India, and the only missing piece is right incentives, and that has also started happening in form of the performance linked incentive scheme of the government,” he said.
Aatmanirbhar Bharat
India’s exports bill, he said, had been rising and had reached a point where one needed to think about Aatmanirbhar Bharat. “China has long been flexing its muscle all over the world and specifically in the APAC region. Today, the situation is such that we are unable to detect any spyware or backdoors in imported devices. We need to do something similar in the hardware space as is being done with software in the form of putting a ban on the Chinese apps,” he opined.
Differentiating Aatmanirbhar Bharat from Make in India, Dr. Chowdhry explained that while the latter is about manufacturing, the country requires design-led manufacturing to be ‘Aatmanirbhar’. Talking about the potential of India to reduce its imports significantly by encouraging more design and value addition in the country, he suggested that India with its “tremendous skills” in software, can integrated these capabilities with hardware, to enable the country become ‘aatmanirbhar’ in electronics.