Advancing India’s Manufacturing Realm Toward Global Resilience

In an exclusive interaction with Thiruamuthan, Correspondent at Industry Outlook, Sanjay Gulati, Whole Time Director & Manufacturing Head, Isgec Heavy Engineering Ltd, reflects on India’s manufacturing transition, illustrating how the sector is redefining itself amid technological shifts, evolving policies, and global dynamics, with self-reliance, innovation, and resilience emerging as its core drivers. Sanjay Gulati, a seasoned business leader with over 30 years’ experience, specializes in manufacturing excellence, strategic planning, global operations, and leadership development, bringing expertise in greenfield projects, joint ventures, and organizational transformation across engineering and industrial domains.

India’s manufacturing sector is transitioning from conventional production to advanced engineering. What pivotal milestones have contributed to this industrial evolution and ecosystem maturity?

AI, IoT and digitization have played a pivotal role in transforming manufacturing from manual to being automated. For example, in our product portfolio, each piece of equipment is unique, which poses a challenge in employing advanced methods like IoT and Industry 4.0. However, we have automated a substantial part of the manufacturing process with a combination of internally developed solutions as well as through experts from outside. This has helped us improve productivity and reduce cycle time by 10 to 30 percent depending upon the product.  

Policies like Make in India and PLI schemes aim to boost self-reliance. How far have these translated into measurable growth for core manufacturing sectors?

The Make in India policy has proved to be the watershed movement of contemporary times. This has encouraged businesses to procure equipment and solutions which are domestically produced.  We are witnessing an inflow of enquiries in real time about our products, especially machines, castings and process equipment, which were earlier imported. Recently, we have all seen success in domestic defense production, which has increased multifold in the last few years.

PLI schemes, on the other hand, have further supplemented the growth of Indian manufacturing sectors such as Pharma, Telecom, White Goods, Electrolyzer, etc. As per the recent report, this has resulted in investments worth Rs 1.61 lakh crores coupled with 14 lakh crore production and more than 5 lakh crore exports, in addition to generating more than 1 million jobs, thus highlighting its positive impacts. In my opinion, PLI is still a work-in-progress, and there is a possibility of this scheme getting extended to a few more sectors.

Also Read: Age of PLI and Indigenization: Can Indian Startups Rise to the Challenge?

Global trade agreements are reshaping industrial competitiveness. How can Indian manufacturers integrate deeper into global supply chains while overcoming structural and policy-related challenges?

QCD remains the mantra for success for organizations aspiring to progress. To remain relevant in the rapidly changing global environment, it is important to deliver the highest quality at competitive prices. With the ongoing tariff wars, all the affected countries would be soliciting alternate markets; hence, the competitive landscape will be challenging. Product innovation, improvement in productivity and making efficient use of the available enablers such as AI, Industry 4.0 and digitalization will be a key to survival going forward. In addition, the FTAs are good instruments for the countries to make use of their complementary strengths to achieve the above objectives.  

Innovation is critical to reducing technology imports and boosting indigenous capacity. What steps must India take to build a stronger R&D-driven manufacturing ecosystem?

Ongoing tariff wars and recession in many economies, especially the slowing Chinese economy, which is the manufacturing hub of the world, pose an enhanced challenge of oversupply of products in the world market at low prices. It is therefore imperative to create differentiator in our products by innovating. We should target to offer products embedded with cutting-edge technologies.

India’s contribution to R&D is only 0.6 percent of the GDP which is very low, as compared to developed countries and its peer group such as Brazil, Israel, and South Korea. The contribution of the Indian private sector to R&D needs to substantially improve from the current level.  In addition, the industry–academia partnerships need to be more objectively focused on development of solutions required by the industry.

The Indian buyer has to do away with the mindset of stipulating the “past track record” requirement in their procurement conditions, to encourage the use of newly developed products by domestic companies.