Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani said his company will invest ₹1.8 lakh crore in the next 12-15 months, while ITC Chairman Yogi Deveshwar has declared that Madhya Pradesh will be his company’s next investment destination.
Ambani and Deveshwar, along with Tata Sons’ Cyrus Mistry, Wipro’s Azim Premji, Aditya Birla Group’s Kumar Manglam Birla, ICICI Bank’s Chanda Kochhar and Maruti Suzuki’s Kenichi Ayukawa, besides other industry luminaries from India and abroad pledged their support to the Narendra Modi Government’s ‘Make in India’ campaign on Thursday.
Ambani said for the campaign to succeed, it was important to be open to capital and expertise from all over the world, as well as implementation of good and services tax. “Make in India is about the present and the future, ‘Made’ is always in the past. We commit ourselves to the Make in India movement…,” he said.
He said, “It is important to connect village clusters with international markets and not only domestic markets by building physical infrastructure and virtual infrastructure so that all our goods and services are connected to all markets”, adding that with the proposed investment, “we would be creating 1.25 lakh jobs in India in the next 12-15 months.”
Listing challenges that need to be addressed to fulfil the aspiration of making India a global manufacturing arena, Mistry said, “These factors include the build-up of critical infrastructure supported by stable policies, transparent and competitive tax and duty structure, efficient and time-bound administration through the use of e-governance, cost-effective and reliable energy coupled with logistics critical for the competitiveness of industry.”
Exuding confidence on India’s competitiveness, Birla said, “It’s high time India becomes a preferred centre of choice for manufacturing for global companies,” adding that the share of manufacturing in India’s GDP was low at 16 per cent as compared to 36 per cent in China, 34 per cent in South Korea and 22 per cent in Germany. “Quite clearly in manufacturing we have lot of catching up to do,” he added.
Chanda Kochhar said, “It is believed that manufacturing, if it works to its full potential, can add about 9 crore jobs in the next decade for India”.
However, Ayukawa of Maruti Suzuki was forthcoming in saying that India was not an easy place to do business. He said that costs of production in India increase because of various Government policies, procedures, regulations and the way some laws were implemented. However, he was confident that things would improve soon.