Digital India for Aatmanirbhar bharat opportunities on covid -19 and beyond
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Responding to questions about how 'Made in India' can replace 'Made in China', Uday Kotak said that he has complete confidence in the Government of India's push for "Aatmanirbhar Bharat". President of CII and MD of Kotak Mahindra Bank, Uday Kotak told India Today, "India should shed risk aversion, and think about this as an opportunity to build in India and make in India."
For Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 12 May 2020 political slogan of Atmanirbhar Bharat to become a reality, he will have to wage a war. In this war, words and slogans will not do; at best they will be a starting point. This war will challenge an enemy that is deeply and integrally embedded in the political economy of India. It will have to obliterate the vested interests of a corrupt establishment. It will have to destroy carefully-created edifices of an unaccountable, entitled and rent-seeking economic system where the incumbent beneficiaries will fight back. It will have to be led by the Executive, at the Union and in states. It will need to be powered by tools crafted and repurposed in Legislatures, in the Parliament and Legislative Assemblies. This will be India’s war on regulatory excesses that have placed barriers to doing business and has slowed if not smothered entrepreneurship.
Between the ongoing trade wars on the one side and a potentially contracting global economy on the other, the path ahead was clear. But the tipping point of Atmanirbhar Bharat has been China on the border, the reaction to which has set the public discourse on fire. Business actors have announced their intentions. When the Chinese state propaganda outlet Global Times Editor-in-Chief Hu Xijin provoked India’s economic nationalism, Mahindra Group Chairman Anand Mahindra gave a fitting reply. On cue, JSW Cement Managing Director Parth Jindal said that the JSW Group has pledged to bring down $400 million of net imports from China to zero in the next 24 months. Three weeks earlier, the Confederation of All India Traders had launched its #BoycottChineseProducts campaign, with the objective to reduce Chinese imports by Rs 1 lakh crore by December 2021. Others are readying themselves to shun Chinese goods as a rising consumer movement seeks to upend India’s ‘cheap product’ addiction.
The government means business as well. On 29 June 2020, it banned 59 mobile apps that are “prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India,” defence of India, security of state and public order. Three days later, Minister for Road Transport and Highways, Minister of Shipping, and the Minister of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Nitin Gadkari said that no Chinese company will be allowed to bid for any highway project. This should now be extended to all critical infrastructure such as ports, energy, railways, broadband, banking and finance. Critical infrastructure comprises that whose destruction would adversely impact a country’s security, economy or safety. Taking the apps ban forward, the government must ensure no Chinese company, including but not restricted to Huawei, is allowed to offer 5G equipment to India’s telecom operators.
But this moment of ‘all of society’ cohesion on our economic future is only the first step. For a strategic and sustainable journey, India needs to be more hungry and ambitious. For which, the first thing Modi needs to do is to wage the war that all successive governments have been avoiding. This is a war on regulatory cholesterol that has been thickening and slowing the free flow of business, simultaneously weakening and feeding off the economic enthusiasm of entrepreneurs. The inertia is so overwhelming that most feel helpless and hopeless and even scoping what is needed appears futile. This essay hopes to change that narrative.
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