'India must look to forge manufacturing JVs with China'

Industry body Assocham today said policymakers during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to China must aim to forge joint ventures (JVs) with the neighbour that can facilitate manufacturing of items such as mobile handsets, electronics and computer hardware in India.
"As a high-level team of policymakers accompanies the PM to China, the strategy should be to somehow get the Chinese manufacturing base shifted to India, along with Indians, as joint venture partners, especially when the Chinese labour cost is also looking up," Assocham President Rana Kapoor said in a statement.
The move to manufacture such items at home will also help bridge the sizeable trade deficit, which hit USD 48 billion in 2014-15 as India spends a hefty sum on import. It imported computer and electronic hardware from China in excess of USD 10 billion in 2013-14, Assocham said.

"This would be a win-win situation for the two countries and would be in sync with Prime Minister's Make-in-India programme," Kapoor said.
Being an aspirational country with a large middle class, India somehow has not built manufacturing capabilities in electronic hardware, telecom equipment and computer equipment. With a telecom subscriber base of close to a billion, it provides a huge market for Chinese handset manufacturers, said the note prepared by the industry body.
Therefore, instead of bearing shipping costs, it makes better sense for the Chinese to make them in India as joint venture partners and the same practice can be adopted for products like urea, photo-voltaic cells and solar panels, it suggested.

While Indian exports have remained restricted to basic items like iron and steel and basic commodities, China has emerged as the largest single country source of imports for India, according to Assocham.
There are as many as 62 major items of imports. Besides telecom and electronics, these include chemicals, fertiliser, organic compounds, unwrought silver, industrial machinery and automobile parts.