Atmanirbhar Bharat, a great opportunity for southern businesses : CavinKare founder

CavinKare founder CK Ranganathan, on Friday, said the government’s Atmanirbhar Bharat mission, aimed at making India a self-reliant nation, is a great opportunity for industries, particularly those in the southern States to create more jobs and improve their economic prospects further.

“The government’s clear focus on stopping imports and pushing a lot of internal productions will go a long way. It is important that southern entrepreneurs come out aggressively and invest and take care advantage of this great opportunity. Otherwise someone outside the state will take it,” said Ranganathan.

He was speaking at the virtual inaugural session of ‘Rebound South Summit’, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

‘Bank on innovation’

He also added that innovation is a great way for companies to bounce higher and higher, and it is important for organisations to create a culture of innovation, which should start from the top management level.

“The latest thing is that innovation is not just for products or services, but can also be process-driven innovation. Products can be easily copied, but process innovation is not that easy to copy, and worldwide people have recognised that process will go a long way,” he added.

Kris Gopalakrishnan, Past President, CII & Chairman, Axilor Ventures launched ‘Mystic South: Gateway to Prosperity - A Handbook on promoting Southern States’.

Lauding the team behind the booklet, the Infosys co-founder said: “This is a very important initiative, especially in the current scenario, where both domestic and international investors are looking at various options to do investment. This booklet is having vital statistics from the regional and State perspective, key information on infrastructure, economic indicators, social and economic data and State-centric policies, which are most sought after by the diplomatic and investor community.”

Investment in R&D

Speaking at the concluding session of the summit, ‘Strategic Leadership for a New India: A CEO’s Panel’, Zoho Corp founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu urged companies to invest in R&D to not just develop products or services but for research on very basic things such as improving the way a software is produced, improving the speed, performance and user experience.

“When you actually succeed in one of these R&D projects, you could have 100 times return. Of course, many of these projects may not pay off and could also fail. But the projects that succeed may have disproportionate effect and that’s common in all the technology development,” he added.