MADE BY INDIA WILL SOON FOLLOW

It is good news that the Prime Minister of India has put 'Make in India' at the centre of India's economic future. The development and manufacture of new products has been the core for Far Eastern and Chinese growth.

Until now India has largely concentrated on service innovation, for example information technology, but we have some of the best advanced research and technology institutes, such as the IITs, founded to drive forward India's industrial, infrastructure and scientific achievement.I know this because as a young man, I studied at IIT Kharagpur myself. There I found my passion - the application of academic research to manufacturing industry. I saw how engineering was making great advances; in computing, in materials, in systems. It struck me that these advances had the potential to transform lives.For 35 years, I have led Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) at Warwick University, which we founded with the support of a British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Since then, I have been astonished by the capability and flexibility of technical innovation.To take one small example from our work, we have used additive layer manufacturing to improve the training of surgeons through the precise modelling of individual body parts, while using the same technology to better protect armoured vehicles through rapid component repair.Prime Minister Modi has set an ambition for a $20-trillion economy, a nation 10 times as prosperous as today. This growth will be built on a transformation of manufacturing, a sector that must grow to be twice its current share of the Indian economy.The change this will require is enormous: A hundred million new jobs, five hundred million souls trained and skilled to work. New industries, new products, new technologies and concepts, developed, created, applied and exploited in India.Like the Prime Minister, I believe the key to India's future is a massive expansion of Indian manufacturing.Of course, many still think of manufacturing as straightforward, perhaps even simplistic. This may be a legacy of many years of protection, which allowed domestic manufacturers to retain old ways of doing things long after new technologies and systems superseded them elsewhere.In fact, the reverse is true. The complexity of modern manufacturing is overwhelming. What is modern manufacturing Today, it is everything. It is light-weighting, It is haptics, It is nanocomposites, it is systems and processes. Manufacturing is now so multi-disciplinary it requires vast scale.At WMG, we have a turnover of £200 million pounds, 700 staff across seven centres working on everything from energy technology to processes and systems innovation in partnership with some 2,000 students doing post-graduate work, half of whom are also working in business.These researchers seek to apply technical advances over many research fields - including medical science, information technology, cryptography, physics and chemistry. Their task is to integrate these advances into better products and process that meet consumer needs.In modern manufacturing, there is a place for every technologist, every mathematician, every computer scientist and chemist.It is by creating knowledge that we will create the innovation advances which will drive Indian growth in the future, giving power and control to millions, just as the dams gave power and food to millions in the past.Whether in electrical engineering, space, transport or data security, the next generation of Indian manufacturers will need to invest in research and technical training facilities which will put their employees at the cutting edge.Universities are well placed to help deliver this, in the workplace and on campus. In India we have seen the huge potential of such collaboration in IT and biotechnology. But these are exceptions, when they should be the rule.We need much closer collaboration between business and industry, and between the IITs and the most advanced manufacturing research centres in the world.This is why WMG sponsors scholarships for IIT MTech students and Tata Steel to research steel forming, advanced assembly and hybrid materials at WMG, then return to India to complete their research.It is why WMG works with IIT Kharagpur on cyber-security, low carbon vehicles and medical technology.It is why WMG works, in Britain and around the world, with great Indian manufacturers, from Tata to TVS to TAFE. We seek to give their workers the technical skills they will need to compete in the global economy.For India, we must focus on the crucial role of our strength in scientific achievement and technical education to support industrial innovation. Alongside deregulation and intellectual property reform, this will lead to the development of new products, which will be “Made by India”.

Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya is chairman and founder of the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) at the University of Warwick. Prof. Bhattacharyya is a passionate advocate of academic engineering and has helped an array of Indian companies go global over the years. He spoke at the 61stconvocation at IIT Kharagpur on defining India's place in the world.L