I write to you from Taiwan, at a time when the Government of India advertises strongly ‘Make in India’ and the British government has suffered huge losses as no one seems to want to make steel in Britain, but they sure do want to make cars…and those that don’t make physical projects are happy to pay very little tax – I think I pay more tax than Facebook UK.
And you will all remember from your childhood how everything was ‘Made in Taiwan’. Has anyone even looked at how the Taiwanese did it? How India can ensure it does it? If a small island like Taiwan with so few people can become a global powerhouse in electronics to toy cars, what are the lessons for both India and the UK?
Make in India cannot work if it relies on advertising India as simply cheap labour. The two major problems are infrastructure and skills. To get the infrastructure you need money, and the Indian Government is not rich like China with money to spend.
Time and again the issue comes up in our UK India Board Meetings with the leading financial organisations in Britain lobbying the Indian Government that it needs to make financial capital that much easier to bring to India – and at last it’s happened with Bonds. No one innovates as much as the British do in Finance. And thanks to them India will have the financial instruments the West is so good at developing to bring in new capital into the Indian economy.
Infrastructure takes decades to develop – just look at the HS2 in the UK, or Nuclear Power Stations, funded by the Chinese. If the British can consider Chinese money, the money of an adversary, India too may want to swallow its pride, and consider Chinese money.
You need the finest global minds to teach the skills too. India can make Nuclear Missiles – these are complicated, it can make computer code, but it needs to make what the world needs that others cannot make as well.
The key sector it needs to focus on is pharmaceuticals. Those don’t just need to be made in India for foreign companies, but by Indian companies who create and invent. At the moment the best British and Indian minds get hired by American companies and those companies own the rights to profit.
So Britain and India face the same problem – how do we get those great inventions from the best Universities to be developed and owned by their own people? That’s key. You do it by ensuring the entrepreneurs who can capitalise on them learn how to commercialise, and also get access to money.
India and UK are both in a battle to build their own Silicon Valleys; those ecosystems of capital, and entrepreneurs that get the funds and then convert them into businesses. I work intimately with the Indian and UK entrepreneur space, from co-founding major entrepreneur networks, to having the then PM launch UK India venture capital groups between the two countries.
And I can tell you, you need to train entrepreneurs, give them the offices, and the tools to build, build. If you want Britain or India to make, build, grow – get the entrepreneurs what they need.
It’s how Taiwan did it, it’s how America did it. It still works.
Alpesh B Patel
