With opportunities growing, addressing deficiencies becomes crucial.
Shyam Ponappa July 6, 2023
While circumstances are not optimal, we have the momentum of a complex economy that grows despite our limitations and restrictions in ourselves, our facilities and processes, and our leaders. Try visualising what needs to be done to get many Indians to reasonable living standards, and you may well see a long, steep road.
However, with reasonable growth and immense opportunities like fab plants, drones, jet engines, there are possibilities. This is not to downplay the negatives, especially for the many facing deprivation, lack of opportunity, and limited access to necessities, including learning, skilling, and productive work. Obviously, much more needs to be done. This piece considers how to get there, and what is required for contributors to function more effectively, while building capacity for many more.
Our strength is a great upwelling of our combined efforts in economic growth despite all our constraints. This momentum itself creates possibilities for additional growth, provided we can enable more people intensively as well as more inclusively. This must occur at many levels, because of the layers of people and enterprises in terms of skills, activities, and organisation. While our broad service requirements are similar— energy, water, sanitation, communication, transport, healthcare, learning and skilling — there are varying needs that reach high levels for more sophisticated activities, such as intensive care units or operating theatres and their staff in hospitals, high-end manufacturing in machinery or electronics, logistics, or research.
We have the momentum, so what do we lack? Take a seemingly trivial example in manufacturing: Ill-fitting electrical plugs and sockets.1 Anecdotally, our electrical plugs are notoriously ill-fitting in sockets meant for them. The poor fit makes for difficult handling, and can lead to fire hazards from loose connections. Similar deficiencies across the board require a steep improvement in various areas, such as education and skilling, process discipline, and adherence to standards for quality and time. We may pride ourselves on our ability to cut corners or improvise with jugaad, but good products require minimal if not zero tolerance in manufacturing, whether it is plugs or jet engines.
Such steep improvement needs leadership with a driving vision for an organised and purposeful approach, with considerably higher funding for more rapid improvement in education and training, for large numbers to be employable, better disciplined, and able to perform to standards and quality at all levels, in all areas. This needs vast expansion of countrywide access to education and learning aids, with structured content promoting quality performance in many areas, to deliver quality products/services on time at a different plane of functional efficiency. It is not just at high professional levels that we need discipline and a desire for mastery and excellence. Very simply, things have to work, be done right, and on time, and this needs to be instilled from an early stage and continued throughout. Our policymakers have to venture far beyond “managing country assets” to creating pathways enabling employment and growth, with the criteria being sustainable benefits to people, not necessarily the biggest or best.
This transformation is feasible at scale only with reliable broadband available to people everywhere, combined with appropriate curricula, content (much of it yet to be developed), and a dedicated core of teaching faculty that can be leveraged by many others in different fields. Highly skilled people can be leveraged by providing online access to others to be able to learn from them. Similar developments are required for production and maintenance in manufacturing and services, agriculture and so on.
For the requisite communications, the issue is not so much the raising of funds by companies, but rather the government reversing its approach to restructure the charges payable by telcos, ensuring their funds are available for investment to start with. The objectives should be higher investment in networks, education, and training through funding from whatever sources. It means our administrators must get past self-erected barriers, for instance, to formulate laws and regulations proactively to enable access to spectrum resources on terms that favour development and capacity-building across the country, instead of wasting spectrum by not using it, and strangulating access to usable spectrum through exorbitant charges. How can it make sense for India to have the most expensive spectrum in the world?
Such steps are essential to realise our potential, combining our momentum with the opportunities coming our way such as the India-US partnership. We will need rapid improvements in logistics, especially rail and road infrastructure, and much greater emphasis and resources on improving manufacturing and research & development capabilities to achieve expectations.2
Our tendency to count contracts awarded as achievements has to be replaced with roads that are built and maintained to last better, delivering higher average speeds,3 and railways that provide safe, high-speed passenger and freight services.
All this needs much more funding. Take the example of Indian Railways. Its high budgetary support does not meet the backlog of asset replacement and upgradation needs of track, signalling, and safety. While skilled manpower is another constraint, we require far more than what is planned (for details see, “Shortage of funds for essential provisions”4). Without massive transformation through track renewal and upgradation, the Vande Bharat train sets will be just showboating, and could even be a drag, because they are not integrated with the rest.
The government needs to explore creative funding strategies, such as private placements with select sovereign funds and others who invest in India, offering attractive debt returns, with an upside element in later years. These sources could be funds from Singapore, Norway, and Abu Dhabi, and pension funds from Canada, the US, Australia, and the Netherlands. While weak enterprises seeking risk finance typically offer “equity kickers”, India is a strong economy with proven credentials that can handle long-term financing commitments.
In each case, with executive decisions and longer-term changes in social expectations and institutions, we have to pull out all the stops.
Shyam (no space) Ponappa at gmail dot com
1: Department of Consumer Affairs – Plugs and Sockets (South India) 2012-13
Others such as The Bureau of Indian Standards Report No. IS 1353-2017 could not be traced.
