Startup India to make industry more competitive

March 29, 2016 2:51 pm

Today our major competitor is China and they are devaluing their currency and becoming aggressively competitive. Indian government should also support us to make us more competitive.
  The ‘Make in India’ campaign is aimed at making India a manufacturing hub and the government is doing everything to lure investors. However, there are challenges too. Vivek Nanivadekar, Executive Director, Fibro India Precision Products Pvt Ltd outlines a few of such challenges. He also talks about the opportunities out of Startup India and Skill India.
Could you outline the challenges that the ‘Make in India’ faces?In India the basic challenges are the logistic, infrastructure and the License Raj. The new government has taken some steps and hopefully next one year the License Raj will get over and red tapism will go away and we should be able to do our business faster. We are 100 per cent confident that things will work as long as the current government is in power. There is a lot of potential for the ‘Make in India’ initiative and international community is also giving very good response for India.
Shouldn’t we promote ‘buy from India’ too?The major obstacle lies with the exporting Indian-make products. Today our major competitor in exporting is China and they are devaluing their currency and becoming aggressively competitive. Indian government should also support us to make us more competitive. PM Narendra Modi’s announcement on 100 per cent tax credit though Startup India would help us becoming more competitive. Now startups will be exempted from income-tax for a period of three years. It’s a great move!
Do you think that the mindset is also changing? Yes, definitely the mindset is changing. Whatever said and done, as far as engineering field is concerned India has much better and skilled manpower. India today produces largest number of engineers. That is the huge advantage. 
What’s your commitment to the ‘Make in India’?Our management in Germany is quite optimistic about Indian market and makes investment every year. In India, we started with the standard parts and now plan to start indigenising the rotary indexing table for automation. We will be building up another small factory for this purpose alongside our existing plant near Pune with an investment of ` 10 to 15 crore.
Fibro is a multi-national company having subsidiaries all over the world. However, Fibro India is the only manufacturing unit outside Germany rest others are trading or marketing subsidiaries. Now we are all set to supply our manufactured goods to Fibro subsidiaries across the globe from India rather than supplying through our headquarter Fibro Germany. This will make our entire supply-chain more competitive and there opens huge opportunities for Fibro India.
The government is also promoting ‘Skill India’. What’s your initiative in developing skill?Fibro India is a part of Indo-German Chamber of Commerce (IGCC) that conducts a lot of training courses. If the need be, we can send our people there for training and when we are looking for a skilled person, we can absorb those trained people who have passed out from there. Whenever we wish to indigenise any new product which is made in Germany, engineers from Fibro German come here. They set up the process, train our people and develop it. So that we can offer German precision at Indian price.