The Manufacturing Cynosure—Cast in India

Abstract

The core policy initiative “Make in India”, devised in September 2014 to encourage and accelerate the growth of the country’s manufacturing sector, has truly raised hopes of rejuvenation of industry, with some initial success. How will this policy help improve GDP of India while manufacturing growth itself has behaved erratically, are worthwhile questions? Moreover, whether this has commensurately shaken the foundry industry to take advantage of this policy or not also needs to be evaluated? The skepticism rises either because founding and manufacturing are not the same but contiguous; or perhaps because no conscientious effort is made to promote “Cast in India” in line with one for manufacturing industry. While evaluating the state of foundry, this paper evaluates why the foundry industry is relegated? How well do the resources (energy, manpower) get deployed affecting the foundry’s health have been evaluated especially for cost and quality while comparing for India and China. The bottlenecks and challenges for Indian foundries are evaluated. Given that China is better placed in terms of resources, infrastructure and people skills, the possible action points/strategy for Indian foundries have been duly proposed.