India Inc seeks better infrastructure

India has to improve its infrastructure to achieve and sustain the levels of manufacturing growth that are being targeted.

This was the consensus at the session on 'Re-calibrating India Inc to set global benchmarks of excellence at Confederation of Indian Industry's National Conference and Annual Session in New Delhi today.

Infosys Technologies chief executive officer Nandan Nilekani said that both services and manufacturing were needed for job creation and growth, and for every job in IT sector there were 10 jobs created in related sectors. Growth of the IT sector was phenomenal because it was not constrained by infrastructure.

Moreover, it serviced global markets and was not driven by domestic markets. In his opinion the mindset of Indian industry was much more confident and aspirational today than ever before despite the stumbling blocks of infrastructure, labour policies and lack of world class markets.

Shankar Annaswamy, managing director, IBM India, said that re-calibration was a distant concept for Indian industry at this point of time.

Indian industry had been successful in perfecting IT and technology transfers for manufacturing but innovation in collaboration with multi skills, which was the practice all over the world, was not the norm here.

He further recommended Indian industry's linkages with academicians and scientists for innovative solutions, 'base of expenditure in R & D needs to be increased.

While agreeing with the panelists on India's potential, Mr Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman & Group Managing Director, Bharti Enterprises said that India's mobile connectivity had gone from one million a month to 5 million a month in a matter of 5 months and that too without any mobiles being manufactured in India.

"We are feeding the factories of the world", he said, stressing upon the point of scaling up in all sectors.

He observed that India' positives are our domestic scale of consumption, excellent managerial talent, availability of capital and government support apart from India's arbitrage strengths.

Speaking about the strengths of the IT industry, which could be replicated in other sectors, Mr Venu Srinivasan, Chairman and Managing Director, TVS Motor Company, said that IT industry had the ability to form collaborations to scale up. It had brought in best globally diverse talent and had the only globally recognised Indian brand - Infosys.