| Dr. R.
A. Mashelkar |
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Director General, CSIR |
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| I’m
very happy to be amongst all of you. This idea of building global
brands from India is indeed a great one and I’m sorry
I’m not personally with you today because at this time
I have to be in Washington to attend the National Academy of
Science US meeting and I really apologize. I wish I were with
you. Let me address this issue of let’s say building Indian
brands, as well as branding India by becoming a little anecdotal.
I remember couple of years ago I was involved in the interview
for National Innovation Foundation. We were trying to select
chief innovation officer for National Innovation Foundation.
I looked at the CV of a young man who was being interviewed
and I was very interested in seeing that he said his expertise
was branding, branding different products. So I gave him a challenge,
I said young man tell me you are an expert in branding how would
you brand India. He was confused because he had branded a scooter,
soap, but how do you brand a nation. I said look let me help
you. United States of America as a nation brands itself as land
of opportunity. How do you brand India? Pat came the answer.
India is the land of ideas. Now here is the good news and here
is the bad news. The good news is that India is a land of ideas,
but the bad news is that it is America that is the land of opportunity
and therefore the first issue that I would like to put before
you is how do we make India a land of opportunity and that land
of opportunity should not be for a select few, but for everyone.
When we talk about development we have to talk about inclusive
development, when we talk about growth we must talk about inclusive
growth. Now you find that today if one looks at the world there
is a new expectation that is coming up. You find e.g. there
was a word called history of science now people talk about geography
of science, they talk about the scientific research getting
shifted to countries like India and China. There is a new atlas
that is being drawn. You can clearly see why this is happening.
That is because of the presence of a great talent pool in India
of scientists, of engineers, of technologists. Do you know my
belief in India is so high I remember 4th Mar 1995, almost 11
years ago, I had given what was called as the Thapar Memorial
lecture and you know who presided over it? The then finance
minister and the current Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh.
You know what was the title of the lecture? It was India’s
emergence as a global research and development platform- the
challenge and the opportunity and 11 years ago nobody believed
me. They said what is he talking about and today you find there
are more than 150 companies who have come and set up their R
& D centers and these are not small. Not 10 people and 100
people. Like GE’s R&D center in Bangalore is 2400,
Intel is 2800. All of them are expanding. In the top 100 R&D
centers there is an investment of 1.1 billion dollars that is
being made, but the recent study of TIFAG of DST shows that
in the next 3-4 years, 4.7 billion dollars has been planned.
That’s of investment in creating new R&D centers.
Why is this happening? I think it is a very simple thing; Jack
Welch put it very nicely. When he was asked when GE R&D
center was being set up, when he was asked why are you here?
He said I get the best intellectual capital per dollar here
and I believe therein lies the answer. But one thing that bothers
me very frankly is today all these companies are creating intellectual
property here. I recently did an analysis of the patents that
are being filed by these companies from Bangalore and so on
and you know what you find. Out of their total global patent
portfolio, in some companies it is 5-10%, but in some companies,
it is 60-70%. That is coming from India and therefore I have
this very interesting phenomenon of Indian IQ being used for
creating Indian IP not for us, but for them so as to say. And
my friends the biggest challenge is going to be how do we make
Indian IQ create Indian IP and that can be done only if you
have the faith that Indian IQ can be used for creating IP for
ourselves. That means investing in innovation, in research and
development, believing research and technology is the future
engine of growth and whenever we have done it we have not been
let down. You just look at e.g. space research. What do you
find? What is their budget? Half a billion dollars. Now look
at General Motors R&D budget, it is 8 billion dollars. But
for that little budget of our space research organization, we
design our satellites, fabricate our satellites, launch our
satellites, not only our own, that of Germany and Korea last
year. So therefore, dollar goes much and therefore that intellectual
capital per dollar being highest here, what Jacquel says is
absolutely right and whenever industrial leaders have believed
in this Indian talent, the results have been spectacular. Look
at Ratan Tata e.g. I like to put it this way that the wheel
has turned a full circle in 50 years. Fifty years ago it was
British Foris Oxford, which was being sold as Indian Ambassador,
on Indian roads and today it is Indian Indica, which is being
sold on London roads, and there are so many other sort of brands
that are coming up. Why did this happen? That was because of
Ratan Tata’s strong belief in his team. Do you know how
much he invested? 1760 crores. That is the highest investment
in backing up an indigenous design and who did it. There were
700 young Indian engineers who had never done auto design in
their life and Ratan risked that sort of money in them because
he believed that they will deliver and today there is a new
brand, that has been created and I wouldn’t be surprised
at all if India emerges as a dominant player in the small car
manufacture in the world. Our brands become global brands. I’m
just giving one example. There is another issue I want to raise
with you. Same Ratan, by the way after the success of Indica,
you know what has he gone for. A 1-lakh car. And why did he
go for that. Very simple. He himself told me. He said that once
while driving in his car, he saw in the rainy season, he was
driving and in the midst of the rain, on a scooter there was
a family of 5 with an infant. He said come on can they not afford
a small car. If I can make it affordable. But it has to be a
car. It can’t be a glorified version of a rickshaw for
example and I’ve seen that. In Tata motors I was there
about a year ago and I have seen the way that project is moving.
Can you imagine that would be an Indian brand, not only would
it be local or national, it can become global. There in lies
the answer about India’s position. India’s position
has to be such that we look at products, processes and services,
which fit a particular price performance envelope. Let me give
you a very touching example. You know there are 4 billion people
in the world and 50% of them are women and many of them have
menstruation cycles. But their income levels are less than 2
dollars a day. So they can’t afford those expensive sanitary
napkins e.g. therefore you have to create a sanitary napkin
whose price will be a fraction of those created by multinational
companies, but whose performance will be identical. That’s
a big challenge in innovation. We keep on innovating to increase
the performance and we keep on increasing the price, but here
is an issue where the performance has to be the where you have
to meet the super absorbing demand of absorbing something like
300% of body fluid in per gram. That means 3 gm per gm. How
do you do that? Not in an expensive way, but in a creative way
and I’m very happy to say that there is a product in the
market that has come now, developed by Sriram Research Institute
which matches the performance level of Procter and Gamble and
other companies but the price is just 1 rupee. Can you imagine
just 1 rupee. Most importantly it can be manufactured in decentralized
way. In our millennium Indian technology leadership initiative
programme we had launched this project about 200$ computer and
it has come and I’m sure if you produce a few million,
it will come to 100$. So what am I talking whether it is a 1
rupee sanitary napkin or a 100$ computer or a 2000$ car, imagine
the level of innovation that is involved and can they not become
global brands? Of course they can become global brands. That
is what is required. What is required is self-belief. Self-belief
that we can do it and that we can be the best in the world.
I have seen that repeatedly that in my own life I have seen
that when I was in the National Chemical Laboratory I changed
the paradigm. I said we would not be National Chemical Laboratory;
we will be International Chemical Laboratory, what we do is
create research ground and we create knowledge as a product.
Ok? I should be able to export that product anywhere around
the world to multinational companies and so on and then people
said oh my god, come on look at their budgets, what are our
budgets, I said that is not the issue, it is the size of the
idea. It is not the size of the budget that matters and do you
know the patent that we created on polycarbonate, we actually
licensed to GE. General Eletricals who had 40% of the world
market share. By the way in that polycarbonate business, with
billions of dollars of R&D budget. But why we could do that
there was a belief that we had created within the laboratory.
You know what I had said; I had said the beauty about the flights
of imagination is that there is no limit to the fuel, no limit
to the height, which you can reach. There is no limit to the
distance to which you can land excepting the limits that you
put upon yourself. I got all those limits removed and our scientists
started believing that yes they can think ahead of the best
companies of the world and they did it. Why I’m giving
you these examples because these are real, they have actually
happened. They are not hypothetical and let me end by saying
that all that we need to do is to say that I in India will stand
for innovation, not for inhibition and not for imitation and
what is a good definition of an innovator. Innovator is one
who does not know that it cannot be done. That is the belief
that we have to have and you will find that Indian brands will
become absolute global brands. Indian brands will fulfill the
need of the have-nots. Billions of them so as to say and India
can really position itself as not only an innovative nation,
but as a compassionate nation. Thank you. |
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