Tag Archives: make in india

MSMEs should scale up their capabilities

Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises will have to scale up their capabilities to design and manufacture parts, sub-assemblies as well as complete products which requires a wide variety of skills, said G Raj Narayan, founder and MD Radel Group and Chief Mentor of Drona.

Speaking at a Plenary Session at the 103rd Indian Science Congress on Aims to focus on the Make In India initiative with particular reference to the Defence and Aerospace sector’, he said that MSMEs in India contribute more than 45 per cent of the industrial output and hence constitute a large section of the manufacturing chains of almost all products. He said that ‘Make in India’ opens up far more opportunities of raising their value proposition than being mere vendors to the large DPSUs.

Considering that less than 10 per cent of the engineers churned out of Indian colleges are found to be employable in the core engineering industries, imparting practical skills is the need of the hour for MII to succeed.
Institutions such as the Drona School of Engineering Practice, which orients engineers to practical hands-on exposure to high value engineering skills in an industrial environment, are the way forward.
The ‘Make in India’ is a paradigm shift from the past two decades of Indian obsession with IT and ITeS services during which manufacturing industries were allowed to collapse.

There appears to be a new found realization of the benefits of manufacturing A&D products in India for domestic consumption rather than import them.
However, ‘Make in India’ goes beyond just manufacturing, to design, innovate, manufacture and support in India.
Viewed holistically, this has profound implications across a wide section of businesses.
It involves huge numbers of creative engineers, technicians, professors, research scholars, sales, marketing and support staff, etc.
all of whom need to possess specialized skills, he added.

The original article appeared on UniIndia.

Role of Government to facilitate the active participation of SMEs

Leave a reply

The Government of India needs to nurture and assist SMEs with proven track records. SMEs who have specialised in their own domains which may be electronics,hydraulics, pneumatics or mechatronics and so on need to be provided facilities of interacting with government agencies, manufacturing establishments, DPSUs, so that they get familiar with defence technology and the specialization involved in those technologies. They would then be able to provide their services or products that can be integrated into the holistic platform. The government also needs to create a new classification of A&D SMEs. This is very important because, once a special classification of a defence SME or an aerospace SME is established, that SME could be entitled to special incentives, funding packages and so on.

The government also needs to create R&D funding facilities for those SMEs involved in design and development of products that will result in significant saving of foreign exchange, because ther imported equipment are very expensive, not only to import but also to support as a part of maintenance. The Government will then have to facilitate the formation of Defence clusters along with their own self-contained common facilities centres across the country. The Government should also simplify the import and export procedures because quite a significant amount of materials, especially electronic components are imported and the procedures of import by paying duties and then claiming the duty drawbacks etc. are very cumbersome. Finally the government would do well to provide some tax incentives to encourage the participation of SMEs into the priority sectors, that is, defence and aerospace.

Indian Aerospace SMEs ready to match Global Quality Standards

Leave a reply

This is the most appropriate time for our prime minister’s campaign of Make In India. We need to manufacture not only our own consumer durables and industrial products, but also the products required for the Aerospace & Defence sector. In fact it’s more appropriate for Make In India to be applied to the Aerospace and Defence since it involves the security of our nation and the self-reliance of our nation to defend and use our own equipment. We have been talking about self-reliance for more than five decades now.

But it’s unfortunate that we have not been able to extend the indigenous content of our arms and equipment including aircraft and battle tanks beyond 60%. It’s therefore high time that we all put our heads together. There is no dearth of talent, there is no dearth of knowledge, there is no dearth of man power, in fact India boasts of the largest engineering manpower talent and our engineering manpower is catering to the needs of global companies for application of their ideas and capabilities in products that are developed abroad. So why not we do it for ourselves? It’s therefore essential that the Indian SMEs are integrated into this whole plan of action.

“The Indian SMEs had proven themselves beyond any doubts by their contributions in the automotive sector and we have now reached a stage where Indian automobiles and their parts are exported globally”

So why can’t we do this for the Aerospace sector too? The Indian SMEs have their own core competence in their domains such as hydraulics, pneumatics, mechanical machining, fabrication, electronics, etc.

So it’s only a small quantum jump that they need to take to integrate themselves into the Aerospace & Defense sector and provide the most reliable, most cost effective and made in India products for not only the Indian market, but also export them abroad.