The government has set up ten working groups headed by industry captains and senior bureaucrats to implement the ambitious plan for increasing the share of manufacturing in GDP to 25% by 2025.
Tata Steel vice chairman B Muthuraman, Godrej group chairman Jamshyd Godrej, Vedanta Aluminium managing director SK Roongta and Maruti Suzuki India chairman RC Bhargava are the corporate leaders to head specified working groups. Manufacturing has a 16% share in India?s GDP at present, while over 30% of China?s GDP is from this sector, which is seen to generate remunerative employment to millions.
The Planning Commission has identified manufacturing as the key growth sector which ?needs to be looked at specifically? in the 12th Five-Year Plan.
According to sources, these working groups will be making representations to the ommission on devising the policy measures required for the sector to overcome the challenges it is facing by giving a broader perspective to the government on what needs to be factored-in, in the coming years to reach the goal.
Planning Commission member Arun Maira told FE that the 10 working groups will serve as a connect between the industry and the government in bridging the gap between policy measures and manufacturing industry to propel its growth.
He said, ?Planning commission has formulated a steering group on manufacturing headed by me (Arun Maira) under which, there will be 10 working groups on various important aspects like technology, HR and labour issues, land and water issues etc. These groups will be developing solutions to challenges. The steering group will integrate these into a plan to accelerate manufacturing growth.?
The manufacturing plan laid out by the commission will take care of the execution of the manufacturing policy. There have been two rounds of meetings of the working group heads with the steering group in the last two months. They will now be making their first set of representation in their third meeting scheduled in the first week of August.
According to Maira, the two critical groups in these 10 working groups are the one on technology and the other on business-government relationship, which are both headed by himself. He also said that the business-government relationship working group has three task forces under it, including ? regulatory framework, competition management and administration rules and procedures.?
Meanwhile, the other groups will be headed by Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion secretary RP Singh, commerce secretary Rahul Khullar, MSME secretary Uday Kumar Varma on clusters and NMIZs, exports and MSMEs respectively.
