Make in India- A myth or Vision

        Many questions we think about nowadays, involve post lock down world, effect of Covid-19 on employment,etc. And a vision espoused by the Indian Government for Atmanirbhar Bharat - Self reliant India . But what does it exactly mean? What should common people do for the nation? Lets analyse the workforce scenario of India.

Majority of the Indian workforce is engaged with agricultural practices. But there's a continuous decrease in the numbers since decades. One more trend is clearly visible here- service sector and manufacturing sector are growing steadily. In this era of globalization, each developed/highly developing country is having majority workforce in manufacturing sector. Let's compare with our rival neighbor China. China engages massive 60% work force with manufacturing sector which contributes almost 32% to her GDP. Whereas India's only 25% workforce deals with manufacturing sector with 13% contribution to GDP. 

Why are we concerned about manufacturing sector? 

Because it generates greater number of jobs. China has evolved as a great manufacturing power and the same footsteps India too has to follow due to her huge population. But what to manufacture? Where to sell it? To sell these goods we need a huge market and fortunately, India herself is a huge market of the world. But the problem is, we lag so much behind in manufacturing things. To remove this lag, our PM had started the Make in India campaign. But did we achieve our goal to increase the contribution of manufacturing sector? Not yet. And now, as the unemployment crisis is knocking the door, we're are again in the historic position "करेंगे या मरेंगे " -Do or die. Major reasons for unemployment in India: 

1)Growth without adequate employment opportunities- Usually, when an economy grows, employment also grows, but for most of the times India's growth was inadequate and there had been always scarcity of jobs. For example - 1950 to 1980 were three decades with GDP below 5% and even after that, we could increase our economy but couldn't produce the capacity to push plenty of jobs into the economy. 

2) Growing population - India's population grew very rapidly as compared to economy. This half of total population can not even have the nutritious meal two times a day. Though emergency imposed by PM Indira Gandhi slowed down population growth rate significantly, a particular and important section of Indian society is rapidly increasing population and it is need of hour to take appropriate measures for it . 

3) Inappropriate technology - As we saw majority of the Indian workforce is engaged with agriculture. And we still use very old technology for agriculture. That's why our farmers don't generate adequate income and so people are leaving their villages and seeking for jobs other than farming. Use of Drones for mapping lands, real-time crop analysis and cloud based monitoring systems are possible technical advancements. But out technical workforce is busy doing outsourced service jobs that produces no innovation.

4) Education System - The education provided in India has less practical utility and innovative approach is negligible. Our education is not at all industry oriented but is memory based. 

What can we do ? 

1) Increase the efficiency of farming : Politicians should stop appeasement of farmers and just waiving off loans. Most of the farmers have lands less than 2 hectares. Due to which, they can't afford modern equipment for farming. To overcome this, group farming should be promoted. Several positive measures are seen recently like Fasal bima yojana and PM kisaan samman yojana but they require more reach and publicity. 

2) Increase Indian brands especially in manufacturing sector : We should promote and consume more and more local goods. Prefer fruit juice over coke, prefer local toys, pots, decoration material over imported. Promote start ups for those items which we need to import and those which have huge demand for export. 

3) Organize the unorganized sector : Unorganized sector is a big part of Indian economy but it doesn't get counted in GDP. These sector doesn't pay taxes and gets negligible benefits of government's fiscal policy. 

4) Focus more on skill development :

We need to improve our education system drastically. This has been discussed here in detail. I suggest to go through the video - Reality of Indian Education

    World shall be facing a big crisis similar to the two World Wars. And that shall be "Broadened socio-economic crisis after Covid" and this can either be destructive for Indian economy or can be a golden opportunity to grow. Let's face this challenge and make India emerge as a super manufacturer over the globe.

Prathmesh Choudhari,

Sophomore and Author,

Pie Editorial Board,

VIT Pune 

25- May - 2020

Update 1: 18 November 2025

India has emerged as a big global manufacturer of Smart Phones, Pharmaceuticals, and PPE Kits. GDP collection has consistently increased over couple of years which also implies rapid growth in conversion of unorganized sector to organized sector. However, many more challenges in farming still exist and appeasement politics has also grown. Many agitations were seen against farming reforms, new pension scheme and many states bowed down to harmful demands. Loan waiver demands for farmers are still making headlines. But expenditure on research has also increased slowly. The fear of financial crackdown still continues to haunt unless the freebie schemes are not controlled.