New Delhi: Maruti Suzuki Chairman R.C. Bhargava’s latest book Getting Competitive delves on the importance of competitive manufacturing as it harks back to Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of an equitable society based on the Indian economy.
The book is published by HarperCollins and is due to be released on 5 July on SoftCover, ThePrint’s new e-venue to launch select non-fiction books.
Drawing upon his unique experiences as a policymaker and industry leader for more than 60 years, Bhargava’s book gives some practical suggestions on competitive manufacturing.
Seventy years since Nehru’s vision, India’s manufacturing sector has been far from competitive and contributes only 15 per cent of the GDP, says the book. As a result, it says, removing the wide socio-economic disparities have remained a distant dream.
Underscoring that the government or industry alone are insufficient, Bhargava’s book notes that “becoming competitive is a task in which everyone in the nation has a role and needs to contribute to the full extent”.
He suggests “replacing socialistic industry-related policies with those that would promote competitive manufacturing”, “substituting Western management culture with that of the East to create trust with citizens and partnership relations with industrialists, workers and the government”.
The bureaucracy, Bhargava notes, must be enabled to facilitate and promote competitiveness. He also insists on the need to create “national acceptance that manufacturing competitiveness is our first priority”.
The book has received rave reviews from leading names. HDFC Chairman Deepak Parekh said it “boldly addresses India’s greatest conundrum — the lack of growth in the manufacturing sector”.
Mahindra Group Chairman Anand Mahindra has called it “highly thought provoking and well worth reading”, while Rakesh Mohan, senior fellow at Yale University, describes it as “an impassioned plea by R.C. Bhargava…to focus on the urgent task of creating an employment-generating and competitive manufacturing industry in India”.
Bhargava has previously authored The Maruti Story: How A Public Sector Company Put India on Wheels in 2010 and was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2016.
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