Fruits of industrialization must reach rural areas

Edited excerpts from the video acceptance speech of Aatmanirbhar Bharat Champion and Zoho Corporation CMD and Founder Sridhar Vembu…

“We have invested in gaining expertise in critical software technologies in Zoho for the last 25 years. In the past 10 years, we’ve also expanded our footprint to support companies working in semiconductors, medical instruments, electric vehicles, and more recently robotics… a lot of these.

This award comes at a moment when we are planning to expand this much further to focus on the critical production of capital goods for our industrialization push. As a country, we have made tremendous progress in terms of getting the industry up and running for a lot of categories of goods.

But the next stage is to ensure that we get access to capital goods and production know-how. This is vital because only with that kind of technological know-how can we achieve our objectives in terms of national security as well as our long-term economic security and well-being.

Because it is that production and capital goods knowhow that enables us to really achieve fully the vision laid out by our Honorable Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) for Atmanirbhar Bharat. This will also allow us to join the league of advanced nations. When you look at capital goods production knowhow, very few countries today—the West, Japan, East Asia including now South Korea and Taiwan with China rapidly advancing—that control these technologies. We have to join that league of nations in order to achieve true economic self-reliance, true atmanirbharta…

It is also part of the mission for me to work on creating and nurturing the talent involved in all of this. In India today, we produce a lot of raw talent, but we end up exporting all of it. Retaining that talent within our country by offering them challenging projects to work on and to invent technology, that’s vital.

The second important part of it, along with that self-reliance, is that only when we have that technology can we really make sure that the fruits of industrialization reach our rural areas. That is something that I am passionate about.

Today if we don’t achieve industrial progress in rural areas, a lot of our surplus labor has to migrate to big cities, which is not good for our large metropolitan areas or for the rural areas for themselves. It’s not good for our culture and our civilization either. As Gandhiji said, India truly lives in our villages. We need to make sure that rural areas remain economically viable. Then only is our civilization healthy in the long term.

For that, mastery of these capital goods, being able to miniaturize them, and making them more affordable to smaller-scale producers who could be based in rural areas—all of that are important. If we have and control the technology, we can envision new ways of building factories that are not envisioned today. Those can be tailored to our conditions.

For example, we are a nation with very large rural labor. We have faced different trade-offs than say a country like Germany where a lot of capital goods are made. But when we figure out how to make them, the configuration of our industry could look quite different than if we just purchased capital goods that are intended for consumption in a different country. That is another reason why it is extremely vital that we master these technologies.”