Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the ‘Make in India’ campaign at a high-profile event on Thursday, which captains of industry from India and abroad immediately joined by committing multi-crore investments and projects in the presence of Mr. Modi.
Speaking on the occasion, Aditya Birla Group chief Kumar Mangalam Birla said his steel-to-software conglomerate already had its manufacturing base in India and now planned to leverage its global production facilities for bringing technology here.
“We too are dreaming big and imagining bold as that is the only way to achieve the Prime Minister’s clarion call,” Mr. Birla said. He further said that at a time when India needed one million new jobs every month to fully harvest its demographic dividend, the Prime Minister’s call could not have been better timed.
The head of India’s largest private sector company, Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries (RIL), called the launch of the campaign a historic day for Indian industry and said, “We are committing ourselves to the movement our beloved Prime Minister had given to 1 billion Indians on Independence Day… The uniqueness of his leadership is that he dreams and he does.”
In the RIL pipeline, Mr. Ambani said, are Rs. 1,80,000 crore of investments and 1,25,000 new jobs over the next 12 to 15 months.
Unveiling the campaign logo earlier, Mr. Modi said “FDI should be understood as ‘First Develop India’ along with ‘Foreign Direct Investment’” while encouraging investors not to just look at India as merely a market but also as an opportunity.
The Prime Minister pointed out that it was crucial to increase the purchasing power of the common man to boost demand and thus spur development.
“The quicker people are pulled out of poverty and brought into the middle class, the more opportunity there will be for global business,” Mr. Modi said inviting global investors to set up cost-effective, high-technology manufacturing in India and at the same time create jobs.
Mr. Modi said he had detected pessimism in the business community over the past few years mainly due to lack of clarity on policy issues. He had even heard Indian businessmen say that they wanted to pack up and set up business elsewhere. This had hurt him and wanted no Indian business should feel a compulsion to leave India under any circumstances. But on the basis of the experience of the past few months, he could say that the gloom had lifted.
The Prime Minister also noted that India ranked low on the “ease of doing business” index and said he was sensitising government officials to the need for “effective” governance.
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