By KT Rama Rao and Jayesh Ranjan
Compelling circumstances over the last few months have led to the birth of a very important national campaign – Atmanirbhar India. It began with the first Covid spread in China that led to the shutdown of Chinese manufacturing companies, a large number of whom were supplying critical raw materials for Indian companies. The very obvious and important realisation was that we need to bring the supply chains closer home so that any such eventuality in the future does not cripple our own manufacturing.
Therefore, in sectors like pharmaceuticals and electronics, major new national programmes were announced that would incentivise local manufacturing of all the raw materials that are currently being imported. Another imperative for self-reliance came during rather unfortunate circumstances – the border skirmishes with China in which lives of many Indian soldiers were lost.
In the aftermath, the government decided to ban a number of internet and mobile products, solutions and apps, all of them of Chinese make, which had become very popular amongst Indian users. To provide substitutes, the national government launched a competition ‘Innovate for Atmanirbhar India’, calling our home-grown entrepreneurs to provide their own innovative products and solutions.
Even earlier, during the early days of lockdown with severe restrictions on mobility, and when videoconferencing became the standard tool for communications, concerns were raised about usage of non-Indian video conferencing solutions where there was a risk with storage of Indian data elsewhere with limited security cover. The national government had run a similar competition encouraging local developers to come up with videoconferencing tools.
The immediate context of Atmanirbhar India, therefore, is rooted in much practicality. Be it sheer nationalism, or the economic value of keeping supply chains closer, or the need for preventing misuse of vital cyber data, the Atmanirbhar India campaign has the potential of stoking innovation and entrepreneurship in the country like never before.
But what will it take to convert this potential into reality? We have the experience of spectacular failures of well-meaning but poorly mounted national campaigns in the past as well. We need to do a deeper dive into the layers of the Atmanirbhar India campaign, particularly to explore the reasons as to why Indians have not been great “original” (as against “copycat”) innovators as compared to many other similarly placed countries in the world.
The global experience of nations who are today counted amongst the most innovative, points to three foundational factors behind their amazing successes.
Innovators who are behind successful products and solutions are known to possess a very strong grasp and knowledge on the subject. The knowledge is beyond the bookish knowledge of textbooks and exams, and spans a wider acquisition of the knowledge and its practical applications.
Further, the bright and talented people are motivated to try their hand in entrepreneurship because of a thriving culture of innovation. Their innovations are protected through a strong intellectual property (IP) regimen, allowing them to reap rich rewards from their work.
The Indian reality is quite in contrast to these successful countries. A vast majority of Indian students complete their higher education and end up with degrees without gaining an iota of knowledge.
Even the best students confess that what they learnt after they got into a job was far greater than what they could pick up in their colleges. The best institutions in the country for technology, management and liberal arts still go on to produce a large pool of extremely brilliant and self-motivated students, but many of them remain content with a conventional career working for others, mostly in large multinationals.
Very few of them start their own entrepreneurial journey. Of the few who take the plunge into creating innovative products and solutions, difficult experiences in protecting and monetising their IP remain a big hurdle.
Innovation is a very structured process. Recent times have seen lots of science and advancement of knowledge in this field. How to identify a problem, how to create a product/ solution, what are the differentiators in that product/ solution, how to commercialise that product/ solution, how to go to the market etc are aspects of innovation that a practitioner can develop by going through a structured programme.
Very few such organised opportunities are available to school and college students to develop the skill at an early stage, which can lay a strong foundation if and when they wish to start their entrepreneurial journey.
Fortunately, the new education policy has directly or tangentially attempted to provide answers for some of these issues. Focus away from rote learning to development of concepts and understanding, vocational education, project work, bag-less days, industrial internship, incubation support through incubators and accelerators, developing a strong IP regime, are some of the most progressive features in the policy. The ingenuity will lie in taking up well-structured programmes by partnering with state governments, industry and existing academic institutions.
Atmanirbhar India campaign can truly have a transformative impact by creating a new face of modern India. But we cannot expect overnight results. We have to invest carefully in the building blocks to see the outcomes.
KT Rama Rao is Telangana IT and industries minister. Jayesh Ranjan is IT secretary
DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author’s own.
