Can Post-Covid India survive by emulating China?
The ship of job growth through low-cost manufacturing has sailed through the sea of automation. India has a good shot at the global consumer, if it becomes obsessed with quality and time-to-market in manufacturing and service sectors
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As the Covid-19 crisis unfolds, the issues of transparency, bullying and sentiments of global consumers towards China-made products has increased the probability of trade wars with China. Can India break its own shackles and provide a viable and perhaps, a better value proposition to the world?
India should not strive to replicate the Chinese way. In a lot of sectors, the ship of job growth through low-cost manufacturing has sailed through the sea of automation. British brand expert Wally Ollins declares that the era of postmodernism has come to an end, which is being replaced by ‘authenticism’, where authentic value propositions are gaining more and more traction. India, with its library of authentic and original modules, can combine it’s natural strengths with the state-of-the-art technology, to deliver a compelling partnership to the global value chain. It will be a challenging task: But no country ever moved up by solving easy problems.
Asian Development Bank Institute study reports that China exported iPhones to the U.S. at a unit price of US$ 179, but the value added in China only represented US$ 6.5. India should consistently skill itself and leverage its global R&D centers to deliver higher value chain partnership. Going green will help India skip a few steps to take a higher place in supply chains.
Indian bio-safe practices of namaste and 'no shoes' inside living spaces are gaining traction. India should pioneer pandemic-proof product design philosophies, standards and technologies to reassure the global consumer against future pandemics.
Transparency international and World Bank judicial independence platform ranks India better than serious GVC players like Vietnam, Brazil, Mexico, Thailand and Indonesia. Though India and China are at the same score, recent events highlighted the ground realities. India enjoys strong cultural ties to South-East Asia through its historical Chola dynasty. With global trade consolidating around regional value chains, India can form a forward-looking value chain partnership with South-East Asia. India should be obsessed with quality and time-to-market in manufacturing and service sectors.
India witnessed policy windows: The concept pioneered in John Kingdon’s interpretation of the garbage can model of organizational choice, where close stakeholder cooperation and political urgency/ viability in a crisis, might lead to a set of once-in-a-generation organisational choices. In essence, India has laid out a brightly lit red-carpet for business.
Indian scale demands particular attention in the current pandemic. World-class drugs like Hydroxychloroquine (Covid-19 candidate) have a list price of $19 per course in China and $2 per course in India. It is estimated that about 65 percent of the children in the world receive at least one vaccine manufactured by India, the world's largest vaccine maker. India is one of the best shots the world has, to deliver billions of high quality and affordable Covid-19 vaccines to most of the population, as it has the scale, skill and the track record to deliver.
Indian ed-tech startups are already among the largest in the world, and can leverage scale to deliver visually enticing education to small towns of the developed world. Global firms setting up shop here will have the added advantage of a 700-million strong young population, who, in addition to delivering a productive workforce at scale, shape the marketplace demanding high quality. Virtual reality can be leveraged by Indian ed-tech companies to impart manufacturing skills to digitally native younger workforce, better suited to handle the dynamism of industry 4.0.