While the Make in India campaign has encouraged many companies to localise production, the quality of India’s products and services is yet to rise to global standards. In a bid to turn this around, a consortium of leading Indian companies has launched the Indian Foundation for Quality Management (IFQM). The team includes Venu Srinivasan, Chairman Emeritus, TVS Motor Company, N Chandrasekaran, Chairman, Tata Sons, and Managing Director of Sun Pharma, Dilip Shanghvi. businessline spoke with Soumitra Bhattacharya, CEO & Director, IFQM, to understand how the platform plans to equip Indian businesses to compete more effectively on the global stage.

Q

The journey to quality excellence is yet to be wholeheartedly embraced by the Indian industry. How do you propose to achieve your objectives?

 This will be an industry-led movement combined with collaboration with the government. IFQM will endeavour to equip business leaders with the latest knowledge and tools in quality management, connecting them to renowned global experts for personalized guidance, and facilitating knowledge sharing and collaboration among industry leaders. For example, the symposium which we are doing in Delhi can be a catalytic movement, whether it’s learning and development or assessment and counseling. After two years, we also plan to award role model organisations. At a boardroom level, we need to discuss quality, innovation, and global competitiveness. So, the objective of the IFQM symposium is to talk openly about - what is going well, where are the challenges and opportunities. The objective is to also collaborate with quality institutes across India. We are trying to also collaborate with quality institutes in different parts of the world including Germany and Japan. This is a movement done for the first time by industry-led captains.

Q

There is a view that achieving high quality in a price-sensitive market like India can be a huge challenge.

 I would agree to disagree. If you do cost optimisation , you don’t reduce quality. What one needs to do is innovate while being affordable. Quality has to be given.  We have to not only think for the domestic market but we should be export capable. Our aim is that MSMEs should become export-capable and be able to deliver quality products and services to different parts of the world. The whole idea is to nudge the industry for self-introspection and share their best practices. IFQM can be the agent for learning and development, some amount of counselling and assessment.

Q

Would this collaboration also provide financial support?

That’s not the objective. IFQM is not talking at all about financial support. The objective is collaborating to change cultures, mindsets and institutionalise processes.

Q

Will you be seeking any policy support from the government?

We are talking about a collaboration with the government in a focused manner. How can we focus together on looking at industry needs? The first step is how can the industry lead this movement. It’s not only about IFQM. We need to work with various industry associations like the CII. Our main focus is making India globally competitive. .

Q

When do you see India emerge as a global hub for manufacturing?

Countries such as Germany and Japan took 30 years to achieve these objectives. In India also, we are not going to do it in the next two to five years. However, if we turn this flywheel now, we can get into this journey. We have to give products and services across industries where the MSMEs have equivalent quality and equivalent processes like the OEMs. It is a long way. But we are in a very good position because the world is looking at us. Second, there’s a huge domestic demand, which is very good. Third, we are a very young population. There are a lot of factors going for us, but it will take a lot of rigour and a lot of hard work to make it happen.

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