essay about self reliant india
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Atmanirbhar Bharat is the vision of the Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi of making India a self-reliant nation. The first mention of this came in the form of the 'Atmanirbhar Bharata Abhiyan' or 'Self-Reliant India Mission' during the announcement of the coronavirus pandemic related economic package on 12 May 2020.This self-reliant policy does not aim to be protectionist in nature and as the Finance Minister clarified, "self-reliant India does not mean cutting off from rest of the world".The law and IT minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, said that self-reliance does "not mean isolating away from the world. Foreign direct investment is welcome, technology is welcome [...] self-reliant India... translates to being a bigger and more important part of the global economy."
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Self-reliance in state-run heavy industries and strategic sectors in the decades following independence had placed India ahead of most developing countries. In the 1970s and 80s, however, India did not modernise these industries to climb higher up the technological ladder. The private sector, which had backed the state-run core sector approach in its Bombay Plan, stayed content with near-monopoly conditions in non-core sectors in a protected market. Little effort was made to modernise light industries or develop contemporary consumer products. India’s industrial ecosystem was thus characterised by low productivity, poor quality and low technology, and was globally uncompetitive.
India completely missed out on the ‘third industrial revolution’ comprising electronic goods, micro-processors, personal computers, mobile phones and decentralised manufacturing and global value chains during the so-called lost decade(s). Today, India is the world’s second largest smartphone market. However, it does not make any of these phones itself, and manufactures only a small fraction of solar photovoltaic cells and modules currently used, with ambitious future targets.
At the turn of the millennium, when India embarked on liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, the very concept of self-reliance was rubbished, in the belief that it was tantamount to reinventing the wheel when advanced technologies could simply be bought from anywhere at lower costs. Two related ideas have prevailed since then, and neither delivered the desired results. The first was that public sector undertakings (PSUs) are, by definition, inefficient and sluggish for the competitive globalised scenario. No effort was made to engender either real autonomy or a transition to new technological directions. Instead, PSUs with capability and scale for the task were undermined or abandoned, along with many nascent research and development (R&D) efforts (for instance, in photovoltaics, semiconductors and advanced materials). On the other hand, the private sector displayed little interest in these heavy industries and showed no appetite for technology upgradation. With entry of foreign corporations, most Indian private companies retreated into technology imports or collaborations. Even today, most R&D in India is conducted by PSUs, and much of the smaller but rising proportion of private sector R&D is by foreign corporations in information technology and biotechnology/pharma. Given the disinclination of most of the private sector towards R&D and high-tech manufacturing, significant government reinvestment in PSUs and R&D is essential for self-reliance.
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