View: Make in India is looking more and more like a bad joke
TNN|
Oct 01, 2017, 10.59 AM IST
Ambrose Bierce satirised money as, “An evidence of culture and a passport to polite society.“ So when market analysts spout Homer in misery , beware. A report written by Suvo deep Rakshit and two colleagues for Kotak Securities, published September 25, is called `Between Scylla and Charybdis'. It refers to the dreadful choice faced by Odysseus while sailing through the Strait of Messina, between Italy and Sicily. Get dashed to smithereens on the rocks of Scylla or sucked into the whirlpool of Charybdis.
Rakshit and Co weren't sailing ships or flying kites: they were saying New Delhi had dug itself so deep into a fiscal hole that its only choice was to splurge and break the bank, or get stingy and choke the life out of growth. They used jargon, but you get the drift.
Flashback to September 2014, when PM Narendra Modi unveiled a scheme called, 'Make in India' (MII), with a gear-and-cogs lion logo. Three years later MII has, literally, gone off the rails. By October next year, work was supposed to start on the largest MII project: a $2.5 billion venture by America's GE to make dieselelectric locomotives in Marhaura, in Chhapra, Bihar.
But two weeks ago, New Delhi switched off the Bihar project, saying electric trains were the future. Chief minister Nitish Kumar, who gambled his political future by breaking with a Congress-Lalu Yadav coalition to ally with BJP recently , isn't amused. He says it'll take ages to electrify India's 1,10,000km of tracks. As a twotime rail mantri and Bihari, Nitish should know.
Against government claims that 96% of Bihar villages are electrified, a 2015 survey found only 8% of households get electricity for 20 hours a day . A staggering 80% of homes don't use electricity for lighting, but get by with kerosene lamps. An incensed GE wants India to pay it Rs 1,300 crore in compensation. Such irony: our loss-making, cash-poor railways will now pay to cancel MII investments. What is New Delhi smoking?
By the mid-2000s, most railways worldwide scrapped all-electric locomotives to pull the heaviest loads; without an internal combustion mechanism, electric engines take very long to accelerate or brake.Now the world's most powerful locomotives, like 2015's 4,400 horsepower (HP) EMD machines in the US or Iran's Alstom 4,300 HP engines or China's 6,250 and 6,300 HP HNX series, are diesel-electric combinations; Russia's giant 11,300 HP Sinara locomotive is powered by a GT gas-electric engine.
New Delhi thinks electric trains will save India the cost of diesel. Is electricity made out of thin air? A study in the mid-2000s argued that it makes no sense to run heavy freight trains, moving under 100km per hour, with electricity . By shifting all freight trains to diesel, railways could save 20% of its power bills. The bijli could be diverted to industry and commerce, which now use diesel to generate power. Shunting the locomotive project could be the last nail in MII's coffin, but there are other stupendous failures.
Someone fancifully called India the `pharmacy of the world'. This hype is busted by numbers. India contributes 0.9% of its GDP to research, compared to China's 2.1%. Medicine is no exception. Last year, a team led by Samiran Nundy , one of India's most respected medical doctors, found 60% of medical institutions produced no research. Those that did were mostly taxpayer-funded, with Delhi's AIIMS at the lead. But even AIIMS produced less than a third of the nearly 5,000 research papers published by the Massachusetts General Hospital every year.
Another study found that of the top 316 medical R&D spenders worldwide, India had only eight (mostly state-owned), while China was host to 21. India does the grunt work of digitising global research or supplying human guinea-pigs to test therapies developed overseas. We pretend our medicine-makers are world beaters. Rubbish. Mostly , they import medical raw material (called Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, or APIs) from China, package and sell them as desi brands. This adds some value to Indian exports, especially to the US, wary of importing bulk drugs direct from China. In 2000, India imported only 23% of APIs from China. Through 2014-16, when MII was supposedly in full throttle, we imported 52% of APIs from China, each year.
The BJP gloats about staring down Beijing in Doklam. It forgets that India's policy of capping medicine prices, encouraging local R&D and manufacturing, started only after our defeat in the 1962 China war. Two months ago, we had to slap 10% duty on imported mobile phones, making them dearer, to tempt Chinese companies like Foxconn to invest. Nokia's Tamil Nadu plant has been mothballed for two years, as investors haggle for sops. Last November, India's largest engineering company, L&T, sacked a record 14,000 employees.
For the near-30,000 young people trying, but failing to get jobs every day, Make in India is a joke in poor taste.
Views expressed here are the author's own, and not EconomicTimes.com's
Rakshit and Co weren't sailing ships or flying kites: they were saying New Delhi had dug itself so deep into a fiscal hole that its only choice was to splurge and break the bank, or get stingy and choke the life out of growth. They used jargon, but you get the drift.
Flashback to September 2014, when PM Narendra Modi unveiled a scheme called, 'Make in India' (MII), with a gear-and-cogs lion logo. Three years later MII has, literally, gone off the rails. By October next year, work was supposed to start on the largest MII project: a $2.5 billion venture by America's GE to make dieselelectric locomotives in Marhaura, in Chhapra, Bihar.
But two weeks ago, New Delhi switched off the Bihar project, saying electric trains were the future. Chief minister Nitish Kumar, who gambled his political future by breaking with a Congress-Lalu Yadav coalition to ally with BJP recently , isn't amused. He says it'll take ages to electrify India's 1,10,000km of tracks. As a twotime rail mantri and Bihari, Nitish should know.
Against government claims that 96% of Bihar villages are electrified, a 2015 survey found only 8% of households get electricity for 20 hours a day . A staggering 80% of homes don't use electricity for lighting, but get by with kerosene lamps. An incensed GE wants India to pay it Rs 1,300 crore in compensation. Such irony: our loss-making, cash-poor railways will now pay to cancel MII investments. What is New Delhi smoking?
By the mid-2000s, most railways worldwide scrapped all-electric locomotives to pull the heaviest loads; without an internal combustion mechanism, electric engines take very long to accelerate or brake.Now the world's most powerful locomotives, like 2015's 4,400 horsepower (HP) EMD machines in the US or Iran's Alstom 4,300 HP engines or China's 6,250 and 6,300 HP HNX series, are diesel-electric combinations; Russia's giant 11,300 HP Sinara locomotive is powered by a GT gas-electric engine.
New Delhi thinks electric trains will save India the cost of diesel. Is electricity made out of thin air? A study in the mid-2000s argued that it makes no sense to run heavy freight trains, moving under 100km per hour, with electricity . By shifting all freight trains to diesel, railways could save 20% of its power bills. The bijli could be diverted to industry and commerce, which now use diesel to generate power. Shunting the locomotive project could be the last nail in MII's coffin, but there are other stupendous failures.
Someone fancifully called India the `pharmacy of the world'. This hype is busted by numbers. India contributes 0.9% of its GDP to research, compared to China's 2.1%. Medicine is no exception. Last year, a team led by Samiran Nundy , one of India's most respected medical doctors, found 60% of medical institutions produced no research. Those that did were mostly taxpayer-funded, with Delhi's AIIMS at the lead. But even AIIMS produced less than a third of the nearly 5,000 research papers published by the Massachusetts General Hospital every year.
Another study found that of the top 316 medical R&D spenders worldwide, India had only eight (mostly state-owned), while China was host to 21. India does the grunt work of digitising global research or supplying human guinea-pigs to test therapies developed overseas. We pretend our medicine-makers are world beaters. Rubbish. Mostly , they import medical raw material (called Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, or APIs) from China, package and sell them as desi brands. This adds some value to Indian exports, especially to the US, wary of importing bulk drugs direct from China. In 2000, India imported only 23% of APIs from China. Through 2014-16, when MII was supposedly in full throttle, we imported 52% of APIs from China, each year.
The BJP gloats about staring down Beijing in Doklam. It forgets that India's policy of capping medicine prices, encouraging local R&D and manufacturing, started only after our defeat in the 1962 China war. Two months ago, we had to slap 10% duty on imported mobile phones, making them dearer, to tempt Chinese companies like Foxconn to invest. Nokia's Tamil Nadu plant has been mothballed for two years, as investors haggle for sops. Last November, India's largest engineering company, L&T, sacked a record 14,000 employees.
For the near-30,000 young people trying, but failing to get jobs every day, Make in India is a joke in poor taste.
Views expressed here are the author's own, and not EconomicTimes.com's
(This article was originally published in The Times of India)
