Article : Will India Make It – 2016? Servicing India’s Growth

December 31, 2015

India missed the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. We did not do that badly in the first half of the 20th century. Textile mills in Bombay, Ahmedabad and Coimbatore, besides many other places, jute and engineering factories in Howrah, even an advanced steel plant in Jamshedpur (about a half a century before Korea set up a steel plant) were all world-class or near that, and capable of holding their own in global markets. Free India went into an autarkic nightmare. We did industrialise, but with the intent of serving only the tiny market of a very poor country, our own. Products and processes were anything but world-class. We set extremely modest goals and our actual achievements were considerably more modest than even these goals. By 1990, the country was studded with inefficient, sub-scale, technologically-backward factories that employed a very small portion of our work force. Liberalisation came to India too late—some 30 years after Korea and some 15 years after China. We have become a nation that habitually and perhaps wilfully keeps missing bus after bus. Tragically, our poor infrastructure (e.g. endless electric power cuts) and our self-imposed restrictions on allowing business flexibility, has meant that instead of industrialising, we have actually de-industrialised quite a bit. One just needs to visit parts of Howrah to understand the meaning of the expression “de-industrialisation”.

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