'Push manufacturing for GDP growth'

India must push manufacturing, make mining clean and sustainable, simplify regulations, and encourage MSMEs, said CEOs at the Mint roundtable

- Alokesh Bhattacharyya

As India pushes forward in its goal of achieving developed nation status by 2047, the focus is not only on increasing the GDP, but also on the per capita GDP. With average incomes lagging even other emerging economies, India has its task cut out.

One way of moving towards higher incomes is to have bigger enterprises, through M&As or strategic expansion, which can give more jobs.

A group of CEOs took on the subject at the Mint-JSA CEO roundtable in Mumbai recently. The honchos of Hindalco Industries, the world's biggest aluminium manufacturer, and JSW Steel, one of the world's biggest steel companies, felt manufacturing would need to play a strong part in India's drive towards its goal.

"Other sectors that will play their role, but manufacturing has to play its role if we have to get to that (target) because it provides steady jobs, a reasonable level of income and, more interestingly, provides jobs in the heartland of the country," said Satish Pai of Hindalco.

He added that mining also was important, and Australia, Canada, the US, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile have done a lot of development through mining, unlike India, where "mining industry is seen through a pretty bad lens. So, players in the industry like us have to make mining socially acceptable, we have to do mining in a clean and sustainable way."

Jayant Acharya of JSW Steel said, relatively speaking, India had a stable political regime and reforms. At current growth rates, the per capita income is likely to double in a decade, but the opportunity is there to take it up 3X.