We must make efforts towards making India; to attract investors to ‘make in India’ and overseas markets to ‘Made in India’
Post the Independence Day speech of the Prime Minister, the catchphrase that has caught the imagination of the nation is ‘Make in India’. Perhaps, rightly so, because if we need to take advantage of the new world order as globalisation intensifies, Indian manufacturing sector must attract big players from overseas.
This would pave way for ‘Made in India’ products across borders. As China, South Korea, Tiwan etc have done in the overseas market and, in fact, any visitor to the US would concede that he has to struggle to find anything ‘made in US’ in the shops of America. But before this becomes a reality for ‘Made in India’, we must put our heads together, not just hands, to take sincere efforts towards Making India — the India that attracts investors to ‘make in India’ and overseas markets to ‘Made in India’.
It is not a question of carrying out a SWOT analysis, to use a popular management jargon. We all know what our strengths and weaknesses are, and where the opportunities and threats lie. What we need is to find the road ahead. Where we go wrong is perhaps in correctly finding the path that would lead to our place in the comity of nations. This has been happening because of our inability to appreciate history and learn from it. Plainly speaking our neglect of history per se, or the contempt of it. We had a glorious past but no one believes it. Our contribution to science and mathematics was much ahead of the Western world, but people dismiss it as proclamations of braggadocio.
Our history is traced back only to that stage where the West saw us as a country of sanyasis and snake charmers. We need to look back further, may be much more into the past to see through the designs of the Western historians of the post-Renaissance Europe. The records are anything but straight. The history of science showers encomiums on the contributions of Western civilisations, about the discoveries and achievements of the Age of Enlightenment. The most glaring is the absence of not only the Indian subcontinent but the entire Orient. Even the Greek civilisation is found to be insignificant in contribution and the one major event that was supposed to trigger the Renaissance is the fall of Constantinople.
While history, motivated by haughty overconfidence, takes about the journey of the Western civilisation from dogmatism to pragmatism, it fails to mention even in the footnotes the pragmatism of the ancient Indian society. The universities of Nalanda and Takshila — the first global universities of the world — the contributions of Aryabhatta and Parini, the high quality art and the richness of the Indian civilisations, the governance during lichchavi’s rule are all systematically ignored.
Certainly, there has to be a design. Noam Chomsky, arguably one of the most eligible thinkers of the world today, has bared much of these hidden parts of history in his widely acclaimed work of 2010. But that is besides the point except that his ‘treasure trove’ of truth is an eye opener. There is a need to dig history, assort facts, package it and sell. Not just to the external world but to the present day generation of India who must be told why they need to hold their heads high. As it is said, ideas and histories need to be packaged and sold.
The writer is a professor, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad (Jharkhand). He can be reached at ppathak.ism@gmail.com
