BT India@100: Amitabh Kant says this one ‘neglected but important’ sector is the biggest driver of jobs

BT India@100: While India has progressed leaps and bounds in multiple sectors, it still needs to crack several others. One of those said sectors is one that could unlock job creation in the country.

Speaking at the Business Today India@100 event in the session titled ‘The Future of Make in India’, former G20 Sherpa and former CEO of NITI Aayog, Amitabh Kant, said the sector in question is a ‘soft’ one and is rather neglected but is a very important sector.

He was talking about the travel and tourism sector, where he said India really needs to pull up its socks.

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“We have done a lot in different sectors, but need to crack several sectors – manufacturing-led urbanisation is very important, manufacturing competitiveness is important, we must accelerate the pace of defence manufacturing, which will lead to technological inflow, then the fourth is the space sector, and fifth is human capital, improving skills and understanding outcomes,” he said.

Kant added: “It is a soft sector but jobs will be created in the travel sector. You don’t want to see a scenario where Indians are going abroad but foreigners are not coming to India. It is the biggest driver of jobs. It is a neglected sector but a very important sector.”

Speaking on manufacturing, Kant said that India needs to focus on the cost of doing business. “If you want to grow at a high rate, the challenge is that you can’t do this without manufacturing. And for manufacturing you need to be globally competitive. You need to bring down your cost to credit. The cost of electricity is also very high in India because discoms are inefficient, and they prefer to subsidise to the households rather than provide credit at the right price to businesses.”

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He added that in order to compete with the likes of Vietnam and China, India needs to reduce the cost of land made available to the industry, which is very, very high. Kant said the cost of logistics in India needs to come down sharply too, and the last mile delivery infrastructure needs to be drastically built up from railway stations to ports.

Kant said it is important to focus on these areas, and the rest are “very minor”. He also added that energy dependency is a critical issue for India. “If you are energy dependent and your fossil fuel prices go up then it puts a lot of pressure on the local currency. So the focus has to be to make yourself energy independent. India is also energy blessed so it needs to increase the pace of renewable energy more,” he said.

Watch the full conversation here: