Last Deepawali like others, I also decided to buy only Indian products and not Chinese Products. Even before I left home for shopping, 2 doubts rose in mind. First where should I go to buy Indian products and second how will I ensure that a particular product is Indian or Chinese. Market was flooded with Chinese products. After two days search I could get lucky enough to find Indian products which I am not sure but consider so, as told by shop keeper.
This whole incident gives me idea that a market place should exist where people can buy “Make In India” products without doubting whether a particular product is India Made or not.
But before anything of this sort could be started, we must clarify that what is Made In India? Paytm is an Indian company but investment is from Alibaba. So should we call it an Indian company or a Chinese company?
What is “Made in India”
In today’s world of globalization calling a product, especially technology related product, completely “Made In India” would not be practically feasible.
Though product manufacturing process may vary from product to product, the complete process can broadly be divided in below phases:
- Designing
- Technology
- Procurement of raw material
- Production
Many a times in modern world, technology belongs to one country, raw material is procured from second country and final production or assembling is done in third country due to various reason like availability of skills, cost etc. For an example most of the time in case of technology related products , even if we consider that complete manufacturing is done in India, we do not own the technology.
Question comes how to define Made In India? In such situation, to define “Made in India” we need to adopt a backward approach. That means first we need to identify present needs of country and then only define it accordingly.
India’ present needs are:
- Job Generation
- Reduced outward remittance and increased inward remittance
- Exposure to technologies around and consequently develop our own technologies
Based on these requirements we can call any product “Made In India” which underwent through at least one of the above phases in India and leads to Job Generation, FDI or reduced Import.