MAKE IN INDIA. For industry, skill gap, land are key concerns

Good physical infrastructure and efficient administrative machinery need to be complemented by skilled manpower if the manufacturing sector is to grow and provide the kind of jobs it is expected to and contribute to the economy in a greater way.

More than the large companies, it is the small-scale sector that suffers for want of skilled manpower. A small-scale industrialist points out that while large industries can afford to spend time and money on training workers, the small-scale sector cannot afford to do so.

His suggestion: make it mandatory for engineering students to spend the last year of their course working in a company and get a certificate from the firm to that effect; without these their degrees should not be awarded.

Suresh Krishna, Chairman and Managing Director, Sundram Fasteners, agrees that skills are an area of concern. But then, he believes it is for companies to train the workers in the way they want them to work. Follow the Toyota example, he says.

There have been attempts to involve the private sector in running the industrial training institutes (ITIs), but this has not met with too much success.

The 12th Plan document says that for the private sector to play a role in augmenting the skill development capacity, effective PPP (public-private partnership) models are needed. The document recommends forming clusters with existing ITIs in projects with total training capacity of at least one lakh each so that the private sector can leverage scale benefits.

However, Surinder Kapur, Chairman, Sona group, says his group had a bad experience with the PPP for running ITIs in Haryana. The model should ensure that the private sector actually runs the institutes and that there is no Government intervention.

AK Padmanabhan, President, Centre of Indian Trade Unions, feels there are more machines in industry now than before and hence it is up to individual companies to recruit and impart skills to workers.

Even if the companies spend a lot of time and money on training as they say they do, Padmanabhan counters this with what happened at Nokia’s factory near Chennai.

Now that the plant is shut down, the workers cannot be employed anywhere else because they have been trained only to do what Nokia wanted. Their skill development was limited.

As far as the other major issue relating to industry – land – is concerned, Sundram Fasteners’ Krishna has a simple solution, from his own experience. Go where no one else has gone before. That way, you will get land easily and at a lower cost. You will be able to build a community around your company and you will generate rural jobs.

If you go outside urban limits, land is not an issue, he asserts. What is going to be the land cost on your total revenue stream? It is not going to be high. But if you want to remain in Chennai, it is going to be a problem.

Look at America, says Krishna. They have factories scattered all over the countryside. They don’t want to be in Chicago, New York or Dallas, because then it is going to be expensive. They grow a community around them. India will also have to go that way. Why only Chennai or Tiruchi or Salem? Why not Tenkasi or Kanyakumari or somewhere else, he asks.

He believes Indian companies are mature enough to do this. Everywhere you set up a factory, the local economy grows. They build hospitals, they build schools. Sundram Fasteners, he points out, has put up a number of plants in different areas.

“We have no problems. Now we have come to a size where we put roots anywhere and it will grow. The only thing I have to make sure is that my management staff members do not feel they are being penalised. Education for children and medical facilities are all that I have to take into account.”

The optimist that he is, Krishna is upbeat about the Make in India campaign. “If you concentrate on the problems, then you don’t see the full half-glass. You only see the empty half-glass all the time.”

Make in India, he says, is a good slogan to start with and, if the policies are consistent, there is no reason why it cannot happen.

“I am a great believer in Make in India. I am not saying that you must make everything in India. I think you should make in India where we are capable of making in India, competitively and profitably. And import those things which we cannot make competitively and profitably, because we don’t have the raw material or we don’t have the know-how, in the short term. If we follow that path of whatever we do, we do excellently and economically, there is no limit.”

This is the concluding part of the series on ‘Make in India’

COMMENT NOW