CHAPTER 13Boombustology in Action: IS INDIA NEXT?
There are two kinds of forecasters: Those who don't know and those who don't know they don't know.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
As part of his high-profile efforts to promote an ambitious development program labeled “Make in India,” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with politicians and local executives at a showcase in Germany in 2016. The “Make in India” campaign is his signature undertaking to make India a global manufacturing hub, and it has received disproportionate attention from Modi and his team since his election. It's one of the hallmarks of his economic reform program, one in which he expects to create 100 million new manufacturing jobs by 2020, six years after he first announced it. These jobs are critical to his effort to develop a middle class that will power the Indian economy for the foreseeable future.
This 2016 event was notable for one particular attendee Modi met there. It was not the CEO of a powerful multinational, the prime minister of a major European country, or even an accomplished development economist. It was a robot.
Modi met YuMi, “a collaborative, dual arm, small parts assembly robot solution that includes flexible hands, parts feeding systems, camera-based part location and state-of-the-art robot control.”1 Robots like YuMi are the future of manufacturing and, in an ironic twist of fate, may prevent Modi from achieving his “Make in India” objectives.
Of course, robots of a sort have been in manufacturing ...