It seems you haven't properly studied history books. When Gandhi talked about Swadeshi movement he meant complete deindustrialization. He hated all industries and machines with a passion. He wanted to bring humanity back to stone ages.
Before 1991 India was deindustrialized. It was almost impossible for anyone to set up industry because of socialist planned economy nonsense that came from Nehru Gandhi duo's failed economic idealisms. Even Industries left behind by British where nationalised and almost destroyed.
Today a lot more products are made in India compared to those times. Even foreign companies are now manufacturing in India and buying components from small Indian companies.
Sorry to burst your nostalgic bubble but there was never a time in Independent India's history when India was some kind of manufacturing powerhouse before 1991.
The Atmanirbhar Bharat Modi ji started is the first ever holistic and realistic approch towards slowly reducing reliance on foreign goods.
BTW first mobile phone bought by you was Indian??? or are you just throwing that for sake of argument.
I am not contesting whether India is more industrialized now vs in the past. It's common knowledge that the level of Industrial infrastructure now is far greater than at any point in history.
ALL I am saying is that the concept of Athmanbhar Bharat is not something new.It has been there for ages in one form or the other. All the PSUs that you see today are a product of that self-reliance drive.
So if someone says that all these are recent ideas, I would seriously disagree.
Yes I agree all the previous governments screwed up even after liberalization, Especially the UPA government that ratified the FTA with ASEAN countries stalled everything in the name of environmental clearance and then brought in that stupid Retrospective Tax laws.
Having said that the pace of industrialization even to this date is not sufficient enough.
The share of manufacturing as a % of GDP has not increased even by 1% nor has there been any job creation. Rather we are seeing a decline in labour participation. Almost all targets that were set in 2014 for 2022 have not been achieved.
Problems in manufacturing in India is immense.You mentioned about the power supply, but it's still unreliable to this day. Secondly, due to many factors, many of the industrial sectors are running on low-profit margins because of which neither they are able to hire people nor pay them decent wages.
Industrialization is not something that we can brush aside by saying "trying our level best". The very survivability of a country depends on it or else it is a straight path to socio-economic collapse.
At the stage where India is there is no scope for "slow and steady into future". It should be a quantum jump and on a war footing.
www.indiatoday.in
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