How you expect 21st century quality from an 18th century factory
Where the tax payers money went ? > Imports and scams ..
Off topic - but I would like to share an interesting incident.
I had a chance to interact with an Indian machines manufacturer. He was of the view that till today India cannot produce machines of the same quality as that of the these older machines. He happened to get a hand on one such machine - which uses belt-pulley drive (earlier factories have one common drive shaft and each machine was connected to it through belt drive instead of today's approach of each machine driven by independent motors). While contemporary machine was using a motor (like 200w to 1/2 hp) for feed system, the older machine was so well made that even now (when he purchased it) the feed system can be operated just by the air pressure of table fan. He kept table fan in front of pulley wheel and -voila - the feed system worked. Although, I has serious doubt - if he could use such relic for production purposes - but it speaks volumes about the state of India's machinery sector.
And here I would like to emphasis the utter failure of Indian heavy machine manufacturing units - like HMT - in bringing India on par with contemporary industrial production standards. Neither, HMT itself could keep itself up to date and supply manufacturing sector with modern machinery - not could it prove to be an essential catalyst to promote private players in this sector. End result - manufacturing sector suffers. Most of the exports from India happens due to cheap labour. Overseas company either buy products which need not be of world standard quality or if they are buying quality products - they ensure that it is being manufactured using imported state of art machinery.
If, even now, govt starts to give due attention to this long neglected sector - it will take atleast 1-2 decades before we reach world standards.
If - public sector industries are using old machines - it can be either of the two reasons. Either suitable replacement is not available in the Indian market and / or - costly imported substitutes happened to fail cost-benefit analysis.
If India - wants to use present situation to give impetuous to Indian machinery sector - It should tell foreign companies (like BAE in present case) that it would be barred from importing foreign machinery. However they will be given incentives if they wish to establish heavy machine producing centre in India. Give subsidies if they employ Indians in designing such machines. And I regard later ( enabling India with technical know-how in designing machines) to be of much more important and required part of the deal.
In any case - such deals (of modernization) will take 4-5 years to be finalized. I want some-pro-active govt - to close the deal today on these conditions (no imports) so that there is minimum time delay impact on such modernization efforts.
Equally important is assimilating modern metallurgy and modern material (inc - plastics, silicone etc) production & processing techniques.
Wishful thinking.......I know!
