Road To Atmanirbhar India

We must invest carefully in the building blocks of local innovation to see good outcomes

- 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.