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Citing the example of the Chinese company Huawei, Indian author Ajai Chowdhry, one of the six founding members of Hindustan Computers Limited, on Wednesday stressed that "demand aggregation" should be the strategy the Indian government implements to develop strong, globally competitive Indian tech and manufacturing companies.
Speaking to ANI in an interview, Chowdhry stressed that the Chinese government awarded all its domestic telecom business to Huawei, which gave the company a guaranteed foothold, a factor that helped drive its global scale. "Demand aggregation. What I suggest is that we should aggregate all the government demand and give it to Indian companies. You may decide to give 50 per cent or 75 per cent. But if this demand aggregation gets done, three or four companies can be selected. Each of them is given government business. They can scale and become big in India," Ajai Chowdhry said. "All the telecom business of China was given to Huawei. Then, what they did, they went to every country in Africa. Chinese gave great credit to every African country to buy Huawei. So, you could take a one-year credit. They were given credit limits by the Chinese government so that Huawei could go and sell it based on credit rather than paying immediately," he added. Chowdhry opined that all government procurement related to a particular sector, including telecom and networking hardware, should be aggregated and awarded to Indian companies. He suggested that, instead of splitting small contracts among multiple suppliers, including foreign ones, the Indian government should place large-scale orders by bundling its demand with capable Indian firms. "They can scale and become big in India. And once they become big in India, they must go abroad. So that opportunity exists for us to become a product nation just the way China did. China became a product nation only because of this," Chowdhry said. Chowdhry also emphasised the importance of becoming a "product nation" from a services-based economy. Stating that 60 per cent of the Indian economy comes from various services, including IT, outsourcing and finance, the HCL founder termed it as "dangerous". He highlighted that services alone cannot create a large-scale economy, leaving the economy vulnerable to global market shifts. Chowdhry further mentioned that India should now focus on developing technology- and product-driven products, including semiconductors, drones, electric vehicles, and other electronics. "60 per cent of our economy is based on services, which is very, very dangerous. We should now move towards being a product nation in everything that we do, whether it's semiconductors, whether it's drones, whether it's EVs, whether it's whatever product you can think of, we must become a product nation. Manufacture on a war scale," Chowdhry said. The HCL founder also clarified the main motive of the 'Make in India' campaign, stating that it means to both make and design in India rather than just manufacturing. "Design and manufacture. What happened was that in the past when Modi ji talked about making in India, everybody assumed it was manufacturing only. That's wrong. We must design and make in India. If we design and make in India, we are using our capability as a design country. We have great design capability. We don't have manufacturing capability," he added. (ANI)
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