Next time you step into an elevator, look at the brand plate. Otis. KONE. Schindler. Mitsubishi. ThyssenKrupp.
American. Finnish. Swiss. Japanese. German.
The only Indian name — Johnson Lifts — exists because one Chennai family spent 60 years grinding. And even they had to go to Toshiba for high-speed technology.
A country claiming to be the fourth largest economy cannot build its own elevators. This is not jet engines or rocket science. Elisha Otis demonstrated the safety elevator in 1853.
When Korea was building Hyundai, Taiwan was building TSMC, France was building Dassault, and Germany was deepening precision engineering where was India?
Yes India was building Infosys. Fair enough. Software needed no land acquisition, no labour law battles, no power supply, no 20-year capital commitment.
So we walked through that door. And never came back.
The cost is now visible everywhere. A country that cannot manufacture elevators cannot manufacture machine tools. Without machine tools we cannot manufacture jet engines. And then no aircraft. These capabilities are not independent — they form a stack.
The countries that built this stack did these things well.
1. Research, industry, and government worked as one triangle. MIT ran joint labs with Pentagon and Boeing. Germany's Fraunhofer Institutes solved factory problems with state and industry money together. Korea's KAIST existed to build and surpass foreign technology.
2. The state bought before the product was ready. Pentagon bought semiconductors when they were expensive and unreliable. France flew Airbus before it could beat Boeing. A state that won't fly its own unproven product will never have a proven one.
3. Capital had a 20 year horizon, not a 20 month one. TSMC needed state backing for years before turning profitable. German Mittelstand families reinvest across generations. India's capital markets reward asset-light and fast. Nobody is structured to fund a 15 year metallurgy build.
4. Failure was tuition, not scandal. Korea launched ships that sank and kept going. SpaceX exploded rockets with NASA's money. In India, audit culture means every public industrial failure becomes a political scandal. So nobody takes the risk. And nothing gets built.
The Indian govt. is mostly busy wasting CAPEX in election schemes. The result is called "Kaveri". A jet engine program that ran for 35 years, govt. spent ₹2,800 crore, and never powered a single production aircraft. Tejas (largely a tech gift from Russia) flies on an American GE engine today.
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