Throughout his tenure as Prime Minister of India, PM Narendra Modi has been stressing the importance of self-reliance. However, several of the businesses seem not to be listening to the wise words of the PM. They continue to import rather than produce locally, and among the principal reasons is that buying from abroad at inflated prices ensures hefty additions to their secret offshore bank accounts. What writer V.S. Naipaul decades ago said, “the craze for foreign” seems to be prevalent all across the country. As a consequence, the call of the PM to “Make in India” gets ignored. The war between the clerical regime in Iran and the Israel-US coalition has made it essential for all concerned to heed the call of the PM. According to experts, substantial deposits of oil and gas are present within our Exclusive Economic Zone. In case we had developed these fields rather than remain hostage to imports of oil and gas, the economic situation facing the country would be very different from what it is now.
Indeed, fossil fuels are not the only essentiality that we are dependent on imports for. In the 1950s, Homi Jehangir Bhabha stressed the importance of nuclear energy. He even spoke of creating energy through thorium, which is present in abundance in some states. Fast forward to the 2020s and it would be clear that India remains far behind China in developing thorium as an energy source. Ironically, thorium deposits in India have for decades been sold to Chinese entities at low prices rather than be utilised within India.
Returning to conventional energy sources, it is hard to believe but true that large quantities of coal continue to be imported when there are so many coal deposits in India. Were these to have been properly utilised during the 1960s and beyond, India would long ago have been an exporter and not an importer of coal. Decades ago, a public sector company to locate and process rare earths was set up, but the record of the company actually doing so is dismal. Apart from his own innate discipline and sense of duty, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) is manned by extremely competent officials, and it is the PMO that must take the lead in ensuring that self-reliance gets developed wherever it is feasible to do so. Agriculture is central to the lives of hundreds of millions of citizens, and they must not have to rely on imported fertilizers to grow more food. In a democracy, the power even of the PMO, is limited, which is why thus far India has been slow to develop its homegrown brands. Not just at the present, but from the 1920s onwards, there has been a high degree of volatility in the Middle East. Hence relying on the region for critical imports carries a high risk. The country needs to cushion itself from such external shocks, and the only way to do so is by developing our own resources in a better, much better, fashion.
The story of HF 24, the homegrown Air Force aircraft, needs to be studied. Frequent changes of requirements conveyed to the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited made it difficult to mass produce the aircraft. Instead, India went in for imports, usually at very high cost, even for Air Force aircraft. A business should be judged by its net contribution to the foreign exchange reserves, or in other words the excess of exports over imports. PM Modi has made a strong start in this direction by sanctioning sale of defence items to friendly foreign countries, and this is already showing results. Outcomes such as the crash of a Tejas aircraft at the 2025 Dubai Air Show need to be properly investigated. Were defective parts the reason, or were there errors in the maintenance function of the aircraft? Tejas has the potential to become a money spinner from sale to foreign countries, and perhaps a nervous foreign competitor ensured a crash landing to what ought to have been a successful flight. In the past, several innovative ideas originating in India were sabotaged by those acting on behalf of foreign competitors. When a cheap alternative to foreign imports gets developed, the innovator needs to be given encouragement and access to finances. The people of India have the potential to be world beaters, if only such potential gets recognized and acted upon. Whether it be agriculture, pharma, defence or electronics, India needs to be awash with its own brands rather than rely on imports. Jeff Bezos, as we know, began Amazon in his garage and made it a global giant. We have several individuals of the same level of talent, and the economic ecosystem needs to nourish them rather than make them perish. Patience may have been the prevalent approach in the past, but Gen Z today has very little patience. They want to see before them paths to a better life in India. In case they believe such paths do not exist, or are shut to them for a multitude of reasons, they may react in ways that may cause some amount of mayhem. We of the subcontinent are one people, hence what took place in Nepal or Bangladesh is not an impossibility here. PM Narendra Modi is fully seized of the issue, and change is accelerating in order to make India a much bigger economy, and ensure steadily improving lifestyles for citizens. Both he as well as Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman are conscious of the need for relief of various sections. They as well as other colleagues and officials would be working overtime to ensure that citizens from Gen Z to senior citizens believe that the government is for them. Self-reliance also means greater and greater reliance on the people of India through giving them incentives and opportunities not there in the past. India has the capability, for example, to lead the world in AI and make use of it constructively while ensuring steady increases in jobs created. The people of India want much, and deserve much, and surely will be given their due during the next few years.
