The ?Made in India? brand is making news. A little more than a century ago, the Swa-deshi Movement brought the whole nation together against the use of foreign goods and replacing the same with home-made goods. A nationalist passion swept the country against all that was British. However, as the nation was most inadequately equipped with home-grown goods and services to meet the country?s needs, the movement did not last.

In the post-Independence period, Indian manufacturing took time to carve out a place for itself in the global market. The definition of home-grown goods has undergone significant modifications. Many domestic goods are now made out of imported inputs which are either not indigenously available or available in poor quality. If value addition is the prime consideration, the last item in the total value chain, manufactured indigenously, should suffice to be grouped under the ?Made in India? brand. When steel is produced in India via imported coking coal, it is known as Indian steel in the global market. Australia produces abundant iron ore and coking coal, but lacks finishing facilities. So it suits it to export to feed others. We have also exported iron ore in large volumes for want of finishing facilities to cater to the Chinese and Japanese markets. And some of this Chinese and Japanese steel subsequently flowed back to India as made-in-China and Japan products.

Thus, only the finished product at the end of the value chain should attain the sobriquet of ?Made in India?, irrespective of its status in the intermediate stage. Truly speaking, if the finishing facilities require elaborate manufacturing capacities to be set up, sometimes even with the help of FDI, the finished products rolled thereof can occupy the place under ?Made in India? group. This is particularly evident in the auto sector where multinational automakers have set up facilities in India to roll out new/existing models to meet domestic as well as export demand under the joint name of, say, Ford India, Toyota India, Hyundai India, just to reiterate that the models have been rolled out finally from India.

The consumer durables sector contains mostly ?Made in India? products and its recent performance (negative growth of 12.5% in April-July 2014 topping a negative growth of 12.2% in FY14) should pose a big challenge in promoting this brand. A number of household goods such as tyres, tubes, batteries, cookers, refrigerators, washing machines, TVs, clocks, watches, gems and jewellery, passenger cars, two-wheelers are the best group of products where India-made items adorned our households only the other day. This is no longer so. Apart from factors like slow rise in disposable income of households and high interest rate on home loans, this sector has also faced serious threat from cheaper finished goods from China.

Rising import has undermined the production growth of ?Made in India? consumer goods and there is no visible way to alter the trend. In a large group of this category, Indian brand leaders have reduced themselves to mere assemblers of multinational brands and left the challenging world of hard manufacturing with disastrous impact on input materials required to produce those items. One area where ?Made in India? branding has received global recognition is export of manufactured products. In FY12, India?s export of manufactured goods, which includes textiles, cotton yarn, jute, leather, chemicals, gem and jewellery, machinery and transport equipment and steel comprised 69% of total export and in two years? time, it has dropped down to 63% of total exports, which has grown by an annual average of 13.5%.

There are common constraints, but each sector has challenges of its own. The call to unleash the potential of ?Made in India? brand is in the right spirit but would need a comprehensive and holistic policy framework to address the challenges.

The author is DG, Institute of Steel Growth and Development. The views expressed are personal