Rajnish Singh, Head – External Affairs, Moet Hennessy India Pvt Ltd
The service sector is contributing 25% of our GDP and predominantly we being an agrarian economy, there washardly any scope for the manufacturing sector. So the Make in India programme has been initiated at a very opportune time.
The government has taken the wise decision of boosting the manufacturing sector with emphasis on skill enhancement, job creation, maintaining high quality standards and minimizing the environmental impact. Thanks to the active involvement of the PMO, Ministry of Commerce and Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion,( DIPP ) in formulating policies, the Make in India campaign seems to be very much on the track.
Regarding the government policies being in sync with the Make in India campaign, I would like to classify the policies into two parts – central government policies and state government policies. At the central level, immediately after the launch of the Make in India campaign, DIPP made announcements for increasing FDI in the defence sector from 26% to 49% and for the railways infrastructure from 0 to 100%. These steps indicate significant dynamism in the policy making process.
Actually, policies cannot afford to be static. They have to be ever-evolving.
Those doing business in the alco-beverage sector have this huge task of dealing with 29 states and 7 UTs separately year after year. And this definitely is a pain. But over the period of last one and half years, we as an industry are trying and to some extent have succeeded in using some parameters of the central ease of doing business model in our dealing with states. On these parameters, states are lagging behind the centre. States are also coming forward to adopt those recommendations and suggestions which can help them garner more and more foreign investment. We have seen how different state governments have been competing for attracting investment.
The Make in India campaign and ease of doing business will help our own industry in a big way over a period of time. Here I will give our own example of setting up the world-class Chandon winery in Nashik. At the central level, the single window clearance has definitely helped us in getting investment clearances very promptly. Our experience with the Maharashtra government has also been good. This government has always been coming forth in terms of granting licences. Sometimes it takes a bit of time in getting new licences but at the end of day
we definitely get licences.
There are hiccups like label registration. Some states have also agreed to online label registration, waiving of fees, etc. But yes there is a lot of pressure on companies in terms of finance management, having good human resource and suffering business losses which could also be an opportunity loss.
I think as long as state governments could maintain certainty in terms of policies and not bring radical changes which may lead to businesses going awry, the Make in India campaign will be successful even in the alco-beverage sector.