New Delhi – FICCI President Anant Goenka has urged India to strategically engage with China to strengthen its manufacturing sector, accelerate innovation, and achieve deeper integration into global supply chains. Following a five-day delegation tour of China, Goenka, who is also Vice Chairman of RPG Group, emphasized that avoiding China is not a viable strategy for India’s industrial ambitions.
“If you are not at the table, you are on the menu,” Goenka stated, underscoring the necessity for Indian companies to view China beyond just a competitive lens. He highlighted that India needs to evolve its trade relationship, moving beyond merely purchasing from China to becoming a significant supplier to Chinese enterprises, both domestically and internationally.
Strategic Engagement and Innovation
Goenka's recommendations include smarter sourcing from China, focusing on machinery and automation solutions that offer clear cost and speed advantages. He also advocated for selective joint ventures that include explicit technology transfer to Indian companies, even as India works to bolster its own domestic capabilities.
The FICCI delegation observed China’s extensive investments in innovation, automation, and integrated industrial ecosystems across sectors like electric vehicles, robotics, healthcare technology, and digital platforms. Goenka stressed that winning in the next decade demands Indian industry to sharpen its ambitions, tighten execution, and achieve much deeper integration across products, supply chains, and technology.
He argued for a shift from incremental research and development to integrated innovation, embedded across business models, talent systems, and corporate culture. This requires committing significant capital, leadership attention, and organizational bandwidth to long-term innovation. Stronger ecosystem partnerships involving industry, technology firms, manufacturers, and research institutions are crucial to accelerate innovation and enhance competitiveness.
Embracing Automation and Digital Integration
Another key lesson from the China tour was the transformative power of automation and digital integration. Goenka advised Indian manufacturers to bypass legacy industrial development stages and directly invest in digitally integrated, low-touch manufacturing systems. He noted that deep end-to-end integration across suppliers and customers can dramatically reduce development and delivery timelines.
Policy Recommendations for Growth
Addressing policymakers, Goenka called for a shift from isolated incentive schemes to building interconnected local ecosystems. He recommended supporting industrial excellence through decentralized execution and aligning bureaucratic incentives. There is a need to align research in government institutes with priority sectors and foster deep industry linkages to rapidly scale innovation and develop talent in critical areas such as AI, automation, renewable energy, biotech, and advanced materials.
Further recommendations include establishing a high-level coordinating body to align industrial policies across ministries, strengthening industry-academia collaboration, empowering city and district administrations to compete for investment, and improving bureaucratic accountability.