The Indian aerospace and defence industry is going through an inflection point as we read in news everyday. The governments at the center and in various states are walking the extra miles to attract the companies. Large conglomerates, multi-national OEMs, foreign suppliers of systems, sub-systems or Indian start-ups all are having options to choose the best place to start or grow their businesses. That’s like a dream many of us had over decades becoming true. One day the most populous nation on the earth will earn it’s place at the center of the A&D world.
However, as we live through this dream, the bigger question is are we really prepared to sustain and further grow in future? There are multiple challenges which will bite us sooner rather than later. I am going to break it down for the readers to understand the challenges and how can we overcome them.
The Challenges for growth and sustainability
The challenges are manifold and arise from a very different operating scenarios on which our businesses are operating today.
The skill gap
This is one of the most critical factor for sustainable growth for the industry. The A&D industry is based on the skilled workforce who are not only trained for today but, oriented for future as well. But, what we see today that many of the companies are depending on workforce which is coming out of various govt labs or defence forces to sustain today. However, in many cases they are in the 2nd half of their career which means that the next generation of skilled team needs to be built quickly.
The other challenge here is that the acquisition of transferable skills. Many of the experts become expert only in a very specific area stunting their growth as well as stopping the organizations from utilizing their wealth of knowledge to solve other business problems. Becomes a juggernaut to move when the situation demand agility.
The industry needs and educational system gap is another critical area in the skill gap. very few fresh graduates may actually have the employable skills what industry requires. Hence, creating a situation where the organizations are looking for skilled personnel and the graduates are searching for places to get trained and acquire skills.
The R&D challenges….. Make in India or Made in India
When the Make in India was launched about a decade back, the immediate idea was to improve the share of manufacturing in our overall GDP and growth. One manufacturing job supports many other services and ancillary jobs. Hence, creating an ecosystem for manufacturing in India was necessary, especially, in context of A&D. I would say we have fairly moving in that as our share of export improved many times during this period.
However, the challenge is to move up the value chain. Our manufacturing giants as well as MSMEs doing fantastic on manufacturing the products/ components most of the time provides by someone else. Build to print. What we need now is to pull up the socks and invest in in-house research & development. Unless we start putting effort in generating our own designs, specs and get more and more Intellectual Property rights, we will be perennially dependent on technology transfer or, licensing from others. Some of the organizations and GCCs of various foreign multi-nationals are spending quite a lot in developing their R&D centers in India. But, still it’s not enough to bring in a sea change which is required for this industry.
The true sense of “Made in India” would be possible when we command our capability on almost all the critical technologies. Till then we will continue to make in India under the licenses and continue to export but, still a supplier not the owner.
What’s the solution then…
The solution for both the challenges mentioned above are investing in upskilling, re-skilling of the workforce. Imparting trainings that can be used for different roles and industries. Focusing more on the transferable skills to prepare your teams for tomorrow’s challenges. While it’s important for businesses to run today so that they can see the tomorrow, it’s also important to prepare for the new day as well as today’s skills may not be valuable tomorrow.
There are certainly other challenges for the sustainable growth. We will further dive deep into them in our future write-ups as today’s discussion was more focused on the need of upskilling and re-skilling of the workforce for future growth of A&D industry in India.
Engage with us or, write to us if you would like to know more.