It’s Time Industry Focussed More On R&D, Says Naushad Forbes

Forbes Marshall Co-Chairperson, and past President, CII, Naushad Forbes, wrote “The Struggle and the Promise: Restoring India’s Potential” during the Covid-19 pandemic. As the book completed one year of its launch recently, he spoke to BW Businessworld about the distance India has travelled since the pandemic, the possibilities, and, the challenges ahead. He argues Indian economy is in good shape, but there remain long-term concerns.

Excerpts:

India’s post-pandemic recovery:
When I wrote the book, we were in the midst of the pandemic. The economy had been seriously affected. We needed to restore our potential.

As things have normalized, as we bounce back, as we've seen a recovery in employment, particularly of the more informal sector. The pandemic really affected travel, tourism, retail.

(Today), every flight is full. You see it in hotel occupancy, and you see it in retail. So I think all of that is very promising in restoring our potential.

Now, I think the longer-term issues are still issues that we need to address. Getting a good jobs employment engine underway, for instance…It was something I spent a lot of time on in the book. That issue remains to be addressed.

Growing manufacturing employment remains a high potential area, growing tourism potential (is again) a huge potential area for us.

Improving the quality of our school education, which was also seriously affected during the pandemic, is something we have not recovered from yet.

Encouraging signs:
There are interesting and (some) very inspiring private sector efforts underway, but an improvement in the wider public school system is a struggle that remains to be addressed.

I think these are some of our fundamental, fundamental longer-term problems. And then one more for industry. I spent a lot of time in the book on innovation. There was one chapter that argued very strongly that Indian industry needs to be much more research intensive, more focused on R&D. It should invest much more in R&D.

There's some qualitative indication that things are starting to improve, but we clearly have a very long way to go in Indian industry to raise the profile of R&D and to increase our investments in R&D.

There are encouraging signs on the public research side, though. The recent announcement of the National Research Foundation is a very encouraging sign.

Done right, it can be potentially quite transformative to our higher education system and our higher education quality, which can go a long way to building the right kind of public research base for the country.

There remains the issue of addressing our autonomous government R&D laboratories, which I also talk about in one chapter in the book. There's no movement on that as yet.

Economy milestones:
Becoming a $ 5 trillion economy is not a goal. Becoming a $ 5 trillion economy in a defined timeframe is a goal.
The original goal was to be a 5 trillion economy by 2024. We've now pushed it back to 2026.

Even becoming 5 trillion by 2026 requires a rate of growth that is significantly higher than what we are achieving now. Yes. I think it requires a rate of growth of around 9%, which is significantly higher than the 6-7 per cent we are achieving now.

I think my concerns for the economy are not short-term. I think all the short-term signs are actually pretty encouraging. I think India's in a good place, largely because other parts of the world have done stupid things.

Hear us out:
And I think we should be giving much more air time to the Indian industrialists who are confident and positive and want to go out into the world and are confident of being able to compete with the best of the world in India and in the world. So I think that would be my message to my colleagues in the industry.

I really think that government should be an enabler. It should not be a decision-maker when it comes to deciding which industries we should go into, which technologies matter to us. This is not the government's role. The government's role is to enable industry to take those decisions and the market to decide whether they were the right decisions or not.

Cofounding a private university:
Yes, I am one of co-founders of a private university to be launched next year.

The goal is to start with a focus on public policy and then to move into the humanities, social sciences, physical and natural sciences, to provide undergraduates and graduate students, over time, with a truly world-class experience.

This is a collective effort of several member companies that are active members of Confederation of Indian Industry, but this is not a CII project.

We want to start a university that can really tap into the talent of India.