Design and Product Development as the Heart of Manufacturing Development
India is struggling with Economic Challenges now, thanks to Covid. Of course, the rest of the World is not different. But the extent of damage India has suffered has been more. Unlike Developed nations, for developing nations like India, this would not just result in lowering the standard of living of a few, just for a short duration. But this would just push a vast majority of our people back into poverty. Only during the last couple of decades India was able to lift many out of poverty, therefore this setback is a huge human calamity. Those of us who read these articles in social media might have escaped this, except that we would have already noticed that the value of money has gone down and going down every week.
As they say, every great crisis is a great opportunity too. For India, this recovery should be not just based on Service led growth. We should aggressively focus on manufacturing led growth. Our manufacturing should not just focus on catering to the needs of exports or those in the top of the pyramid. It should focus on the bottom of the pyramid and simultaneously use this opportunity to lift them to the middle of the pyramid.
What we see is that all the startup initiatives or product development in India by the most creative and entrepreneurial minds are focused ONLY on creating products for the top 250 million middle class. Of course that is a good market to sell and make profits, by rapidly scaling. This would create two divided India, as we could see during the Pandemic, how our urban poor had to walk 100s of miles to go back to their village without any support. We all should be ashamed that so much inequality persists in India. Neither we can blame only the present state or central governments nor we can give credit to the current Governments for the success we have achieved during the last couple of decades. We have a mid way shock. We have to reprioritize our focus on development and poverty alleviation. There is an economic means. The economic means is closely tied to the field of Engineering. More important the expertise in Design Engineering. Let me explain about this.
The new opportunity for India would come from our ability to turn our country into a manufacturing powerhouse, even many nations are looking for alternative sources for China. The first challenge to address to capitalize in this market is to develop serious manufacturing skills. It is not just about a couple of weeks of training in the Skill India mission based training that we tend to offer in class rooms and try to churn out “skilled people”. The millions spent in this way of rapid skilling is neither useful nor lasting. We need to develop deeper skills.
Skill development should start at a young age, in schools for our Children. We may not be able to send our late teens into schools and train them to acquire skills. We have to continue to engage with these people in Colleges repairing the mistakes we made in schools by not preparing them for the real world. It is not just about curriculum also. It is a problem that we have in holistically approaching our education. This requires a change in societal mindset.
We continue with a social construct in our society which promotes a system of looking down at people who make things or those who deal with materials in hands. We hate people who touch grease and oil or soil their clothes and sweat. Manufacturing involves all these, if one has to develop expertise in machines and making. We do not value those who use tools as professionals or creators. This tendency might have started with our caste hierarchical system. Thus we always think and promote literacy as against technical-skills as an important way to secure living. No doubt literacy is very important. Pure literacy or literature for the sake of literature only encourages people to engage in rhetoric not help them to develop a bias for action or to try things or conduct an experiment or to make new things. This has seeped strongly in our minds and we look down at people who work on machines. When I was in college as a Mechanical Engineering student, in the 5 years of my college, totally I would have spent hardly about 70 hours in labs with some so called uniform, dealing with machines. We were operating a few machines and conducted some experiments in labs in Fluid machinery labs and on some Electrical Machineries. I remember whenever we had to do these experiments, we were reluctant, many even hated these sessions. The closest to Engineering task that we did with imagination was our drawing classes. Half of the classes hated Engineering Drawing as a subject. And all these people also scored very high marks and left the college and almost 80% of them ended up doing non-Engineering jobs.
As an entrepreneur, I had the opportunity to work in both hardware design and manufacturing and later now in Software Engineering. I started off with almost no knowledge in real Engineering. My experience tells me that be it hardware engineering or software, depth matters. The Indian software success is also the result of our focus on hard work and attention to detail. I wonder why we could not channelize the same way our smart Engineers to work in manufacturing fields. Today of course, many hardware companies are becoming software influenced. With IoT the gap between Software and Hardware is blurring. Even then a successful Engineer is supposed to have a comprehensive understanding of both hardware, software, material, processing and above all Design. Depth in Engineering would always matter.
The problem why we are unable to build a strong manufacturing base is because we failed to teach and develop a culture of design in our Engineering Schools. In all the 10 semesters, and it may be 8 semesters perhaps now, when I was in Engineering College, there was hardly any mention of the phrase Product Design. The word design was associated with only one paper in the Mechanical Engineering course, in which we talked about Machine Design and in our elective classes, we were taught another paper called Tool Design. Now I realize how important that Engineers should be taught Design - Design as a discipline of creating new things. After all, one of the important tasks Engineer’s is to create new things. Design them first. Create new things to holistically solve problems. Even when they design parts, they are supposed to know the total system. Design has to be approached not as just solving one problem or quick fix, like a road-side mechanic, keeps tinkering with all things to solve a problem which he could not diagnose. Design is a comprehensive art of blending of mental and often multidisciplinary engineering work, with deeper understanding of problems and evolving of solutions. Not just something which would work, but also a solution that will meet with the expectations of customers and solve their problem. Which means, the solution should be easy to use, cost low and be reliable. It does not end there, it also involves that throughout the product's long life, the customer must have peace of mind when he uses the product. In the modern world, most of these technical products are an extension of our limbs and thoughts, such as this computer on which I am writing this article.
The sooner who encourage our students and schools to learn design and design thinking the better society would become. We may have to introduce design in our curricula and we should open more design schools. World's most valuable companies like Apple or Tesla thrive because of their design prowess. When I say design it does not necessarily mean we should design only the most sophisticated products. Design and product culture is not only our gateway to economic success, reduction of poverty or to serve the bottom of the pyramid, it would also lift more people out of poverty. We need to constantly innovate and design appropriate products for our masses, not necessarily those seemingly sophisticated products which only cater to our top of the pyramid. By focusing on design and our bottom of the pyramid, we would be able to unleash a big market waiting to be tapped and that would eventually make us the economic powerhouse we are all talking about.