Time to make radical change for faster growth of manufacturing: Maruti Suzuki Chairman

In order to ensure faster growth for local manufacturing, radical changes are required at work and the coronavirus outbreak has created greater awareness among the people for the same, said Maruti Suzuki India Ltd Chairman RC Bhargava. He was addressing the shareholders at the 39th annual general meeting earlier today.

“I believe the pandemic is creating a greater awareness among all the people in the country that this is the time to make radical changes in the way we do our work. This is the time when we should take steps which should lead to much faster growth of the economy, which means much faster growth of manufacturing,” Bhargava said.

He said the key prerequisite in ensuring faster economic growth is to first have a national consensus on the need to grow manufacturing and create new jobs.

“The strategy for growing manufacturing is to have a national consensus on the same,” he said, adding that such a consensus would ensure that introducing new changes henceforth would become easier.

Bhargava said that to achieve a national consensus, it is important for all the industry stakeholders to understand the changes required and participate and support the government policies.

“This would make India a more competitive manufacturing country. If that happens, we will all grow much faster,” he said.

In the past few years, the Modi government has introduced several new regulatory requirements for the automotive industry including new safety mandates and the BSVI emission norms, alongside its push for the local manufacturing of electric vehicles in order to curb the oil import bill.

Earlier in May, the government announced the atmanirbhar bharat package wherein the focus was drawn on promoting local manufacturing and reducing reliance on imports from the foreign countries, especially China.

The government’s push for self-reliance has made several automakers evaluate the dependency of their supply chain ecosystem on China.

Bhargava added that the growth of the automobile industry, particularly the car industry is a very good indicator of the wellbeing of the people of a country, of the economic health of the nation and how well the country is growing in terms of providing different kinds of benefits to the citizens.

“I am saying this at the same time I recognize that the car industry, the auto industry’s growth is entirely dependent on how well the other sectors of the economy perform. How well the people at large prosper; how well the GDP increases. It cannot be an independent island in the economy,” he said.

We are part of the whole economy; we will grow as the whole grows and fortunately the government is very keen and taking many many steps to grow the entire economy, he added.