If 'make in india' is to succeed, it needs to encompass 'make it the indian way'. Examine in context of popularity of additive manufacturing technology.(250 words)5)
Answers
If ‘Make in India’ is to succeed, it needs to encompass ‘Make it the Indian Way’. It need not emulate mass production technologies, fuelled in Detroit by massive capital investment or in Beijing by cheap labour. We are fortunate to be in a historic moment when the manufacturing sector is about to go through a transformation wrought by disruptive technologies — we have to find a way of making it work in India’s favour rather than against it.
Getting a measure
Industrial 3D printing has begun to transform manufacturing in Western countries. The 3D printing has not yet entered our everyday lexicon, and even people who have heard of it view it as a toy technology that geeks play with, creating prototypes of robots using small machines that create moulds using materials such as plastic and photosensitive resins. Part of it must be the name, whoever heard of serious manufacturing using a printer! Rename this to “additive technology” and think of Ford Motors cutting down its cost of creating a new car prototype from six months and several hundred thousand dollars to four days and $4,000, and you begin to see its power.
Traditional manufacturing of mechanical parts involves making a mould and then stamping out parts by thousands every day. The equipment to make these parts and moulds is expensive, thus the cost of the first hundred units is high. Per unit costs decline only when they are mass produced. Because of limitations of how this technology works, one typically builds many small parts, which are later on assembled on an assembly line using unskilled labour or robots to build an entire system. Traditional manufacturing leads to high inventory costs of multiple parts that need to be produced and stored before being assembled. This makes the design phase complex and costly, rendering it expensive to redesign to correct initial mistakes or innovate to meet changing consumer needs.
In additive manufacturing, the physical object to be built is first designed in software. This design is fed to computerised machines, which build that object layer by layer. The technology is suitable for building the entire system in one go, with hollow interiors without assembly or interlocked parts. Changing features or tweaking shapes is a simple software change effected in minutes. Retooling of machines is not required and each unit can be customised. By eliminating the need to hold a large inventory of parts, set up an assembly line and purchase costly machines, adaptive manufacturing reduces capital and space requirements as well as the carbon footprint.