
In 2014, India sent a spacecraft to Mars for less than the cost of a Hollywood film. A feat hailed across the world. ISRO’s mission was not just a technological milestone, but a symbol of India’s scientific potential. Yet, in the air-conditioned homes of its rising middle class, the machines humming away on summer afternoons often carry the logos of LG, Daikin, or Midea. The irony is inescapable: a nation that builds rockets to space still imports compressors for its air conditioners.
This paradox sits at the heart of India’s manufacturing dilemma. The market is large. The ambition is real. But the path from aspiration to autonomy remains largely untraveled.
The hollowing out of India’s domestic product base didn’t happen overnight. It began with the liberalisation of 1991 and was gently caressed by successive governments that mistook market opening for market substitution. From luggage ware to umbrellas, edible oils to inner garments — entire sectors once nurtured by skilled Indian enterprises were quietly wiped out. Cottage-based coconut farming, traditional oil ghani mills, small umbrella manufacturers in Kerala and West Bengal, and suitcase makers from Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra all lost their footing. No transitional support. No technology upgrade schemes. Just the open floodgates of imports.
Today, India flaunts its foreign exchange reserves, but fails to confront its matching — and massive — dollar spending on consumer goods that could have been made, designed, and scaled at home.
India’s consumer market has expanded dramatically in the past two decades. Air conditioners, washing machines, televisions, treadmills, vacuum cleaners, construction equipment, and even basic wellness devices now find a place in middle-class homes. Yet, most of these carry foreign roots in either components or design.
Take air conditioners. Despite the push for Make in India, more than 85% of compressors are still imported. The Chinese supply chain supplies the motor. Koreans dominate inverter technology. The PCBs, the sensors, even the refrigerants are often sourced from abroad. This is not a capability issue. It is a policy, incentive, and risk-alignment issue.
Tata’s commercial vehicle venture with Mercedes-Benz in the 1950s helped launch India’s truck industry, but decades later, Tata Motors still struggles to match the engineering finesse of its European peers. Tata passenger vehicles have improved but are rarely benchmarked against a Mercedes or a BMW.
Voltas, once India’s top cooling solutions brand, partnered with several international companies over decades. Yet, today, its core components are still imported. Godrej, another legacy name, proudly launched the “green AC” but continues to rely on foreign inputs for compressors and inverter parts.
The story repeats in construction equipment. JCB, Bobcat, and Komatsu continue to dominate the market. Attempts by Indian manufacturers to break in have met with short-lived results. Local companies have assembled, even manufactured under license, but not innovated.
There is also an external perception problem. In the 1990s, Titan built the slimmest watch movement in the world, the Titan Edge. When they approached the head of Swatch Group, Hayek Sr., hoping to supply their innovation to global luxury brands, he reportedly declined. His reasoning: “Luxury is as much about perception as precision, and an Indian movement risks the narrative of European craftsmanship.”
Prejudice? Certainly. But not uncommon. Western luxury markets, unlike technology or mass retail, are tightly gatekept. The perception of India as a low-cost, low-quality market persists, despite pockets of brilliance.
India has hundreds of brands selling consumer durables, but few invest meaningfully in product R&D. Building block machines, vital for rural housing and low-cost construction, are still imported. Basic treadmill designs, robotic vacuum cleaners, high-speed kitchen blenders — all imported, or assembled with imported parts.
Why can’t Indian companies make a best-in-class treadmill or a competitive Bobcat alternative? The answers: no incentive to invest in R&D, no ecosystem of component suppliers, and an over-reliance on short-term ROI.
Compare this to South Korea. When LG and Hyundai were nascent, the government protected them, funded their R&D, created internal demand through public procurement, and pushed them to compete abroad. Today, their brands define global standards.
India has also allowed legacy engineering and manufacturing firms to fall by the wayside, often without even a murmur. Standard Motors, once a symbol of India’s automotive promise, and HMT (Hindustan Machine Tools), which once dominated the machine tools and wristwatch market and was a household name across middle-class India, were both allowed to fade. Their decline wasn’t just about competition — it reflected the absence of a policy to protect and reinvent industrial capabilities.
Compare this to how nations like the UK or Germany have consistently supported their icons — Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems, even Airbus — with a mix of capital infusion, strategic partnerships, and market preference. When IBM faltered, the U.S. ensured its revival. When Levi’s or Coca-Cola restructured, it was never with the indifference that Indian companies have had to endure.
The government should not be a bystander as homegrown companies collapse under pressure. Preserving and upgrading indigenous industrial skill is not nostalgia — it’s strategic economy-building.
Tata, Birla, Godrej, Reliance, Adani — all giants with decades of industrial experience, resources, and political access. Yet, how many path-breaking consumer technologies have they created?
Reliance Jio transformed data pricing. But is there a Jio smartphone, chipset, or router of global calibre? Adani is building ports, airports, and solar parks. But where is the Indian equivalent of a Caterpillar or a Siemens?
India’s MSMEs, meanwhile, are often left to fend for themselves. They see imported machines flood the market, undercutting their ambitions. Instead of being hand-held and supported into innovation clusters, they survive on jugaad and subsidies.
India needs a new industrial compact. The government should mandate large corporates receiving incentives or operating in critical sectors to:
Policy, more than potential, limits Indian manufacturing.
Without deep tech manufacturing, Make in India risks becoming Make for India — assembling, painting, and packaging what the world makes elsewhere.
India has the engineering talent. It has capital. It has a market. What it lacks is the determined coalition of policy, enterprise, and consumer expectation.
The Chinese fought perception with scale. The Koreans fought it with consistency. India must fight it with clarity, courage, and conviction.
Else, we will keep building rockets, while importing the compressors that cool our rooms on summer nights. And the world will clap, but not count us in.
Even today, we import the simplest of gadgets — from hair clippers to coffee frothers — devices so basic, their foreign tags should make us pause. But instead, we hide behind retail packaging while the innovation remains offshore.
It’s time we stopped applauding potential and started building products.