One of the youngest corporate chiefs in the Indian automotive industry and a leading road safety crusader, Ramashankar Pandey, Managing Director of Hella India Lighting, gave an insightful presentation at the Autocar Professional webinar on 'Manufacturing and Skilling after Covid-19' held on May 1, International Labour Day. He was one of the five panelists.
The panelists for the first webinar of May 2020 comprised Vijay Kalra, Head, Mahindra Institute of Quality and Ex-Chief of Manufacturing Operations- Automotive Division, Mahindra & Mahindra; Nikunj Sanghi, Chairman, Automotive Skill Development Council (ASDC); Ramashankar Pandey, Managing Director, Hella India Lighting; Rohan Rathod, Managing Director, Delux Bearings; and Ashim Sharma, Partner & Group Head - Business Performance Improvement (Auto, Engineering & Logistics), Nomura Research Institute.
Ramashankar Pandey spoke on the various aspects around the impact of Covid-19 on organisations and its workforce. “We are surrounded by unprecedented uncertainties. We have succeeded in the initial phase, despite the ailing health system for majority of its population. We might be winning the war against corona but is going to be a long battle.”
He agreed that the ongoing lockdown is a big jolt to the economy and the manufacturing sector, as the supply chain is completely broken. According to Pandey, each one of us has a personal, professional and rational responsibility in this fight against Covid-19, and no one by themselves alone can win the fight. He agreed that that the present situation is quite challenging, especially the broken finances for MSMEs (Tier 2s and 3s), which poses a huge risk of extreme poverty and the likelihood of creating unrest.
On the other hand, he asserted that while the “India has many challenges, the fear psychosis of the unknown, the collective wisdom is travelling faster than the virus. All stakeholders are coming together, the global action is fully justified, but the fear is not. We are doing whatever we can, compared to deaths per day worldwide due to road accidents, Covid-19 is very less. Given the extreme measures by all nations and global prioritisation, the fear may be overproportional compared to other bigger killers. Every CEO, management and stakeholder is doing what is humanly possible.”
"The post-Covid challenge ahead of India Auto Inc is immense. This is right from logistics for manufacturing plants resuming operations, workers returning to the shopfloor and revival of demand. But there are positives too in the form of new SOPs."
Man-machine collaboration to drive productivity
He said that there is a big change happening because of digitalisation and Covid-19 has just helped increase the focus. Pandey believes that while the topic may have missed the attention for masses, the current lockdown has brought the focus on skilling and digitalisation into sharp focus.
According to him, smart industrialisation is here to say, and one can simply look at their people's daily lives, particuarly in urban and some parts of rural India, to experience that they are now more reliant on digital tools, then they were in pre-Covid-19 days.
For the manufacturing sector, it means moving from labour-intensive methodologies to automation. According to Pandey, the meaning of lockdown changes based on income groups and financial security. Trust and respect is a huge capital, because of the highly skewed income distribution and respect allocation in society. Focusing on the potential future, he asked what kind of education does India need to focus on?
The answer is everything. “When the people are not skilled or not educated, they remain vulnerable. The worst is that we cannot pay them more (lower class), our productivity is the lowest in the world. The policy of life will come that “You are, therefore I am”. Perform ‘ghar wapasi’ on productivity. The vision of our industrial policy needs to focus on fair wealth distribution. States must now compete not on how much investment has come but how much employment has been generated. The skill robbery happening in the country needs to be fixed,” commented Pandey.
"Covid has accelerated the growth of the cyber-physical world. India should marry man with machine to enhance productivity. Highly skewed income distribution and a lack of respect for labour remain a big concern. Lack of respect leads to lowered productivity and efficiency, which serve to robs India of a competitive edge."