How to 10x MakeInIndia

In the early years of the aughts, I developed microcontroller based remote controllers for air conditioners. Other than the microcontroller, the entire unit, what we would now call a cyber-physical system, was indigenously developed by us. This product was the first high volume product that my company (PRAVAK) developed, manufactured, and sold to the AC manufacturers. Because we were importing the microcontrollers, we were keeping track of the count. I was jubilant when we breached the 10,000 microcontrollers mark for two successive years. Then LG and Samsung entered the Indian consumer goods market, and the local competition was wiped out. Indigenous technology lost the battle of the air conditioner remote controllers.

We pivoted to designing microcontroller based energy meters. The entire hardware and firmware was indigenously created by us (except the microcontroller itself). The back story is that at that time, electronic energy meters had just been introduced in the country. The distribution companies were saddled with power theft, and other ailments which plagued the government service providers. Electronic meters were supposed to combat some of the issues. The first units supplied by a particular manufacturer (with buggy and poor quality firmware) were severely unreliable. Large scale deployment of these units led to incorrect bills being raised for consumers, for example, farmers who used electricity for irrigation. The unreliability created a political storm and raised a furore in the state assembly. We were referred to this company as cyber-physical specialists who could solve this problem. The meters we designed were reliable, accurate, tamper-proof, low-cost, and had a robust firmware. With this product we crossed the 100,000 microcontrollers per year, and subsequently, the 1 million microcontrollers mark. The energy metering market was a unique high volume domain — everyone in India who uses electricity needs to be supplied with an energy meter. Indigenous products are now dominating this space. Indigenous technology won this battle.

Now that I think back, the pivot was in how we used our expertise. From creating the entire product within our organization (as in the case of the air conditioner remote controllers), to creating a cyber-physical technical design and allowing a number of manufacturers to license it — this change in how we used our expertise created a win for #MakeInIndia even before it was a hashtag. It allowed us to 10x our impact.

Over the next decade, I was ready to challenge myself anew — this time to create indigenously developed technical products for the defense sector. The unique challenges attracted me. We replaced valve and transistor based systems with LSIs, VLSIs and MCU based designs, first as sub-modules and spare parts for radars, ground equipment and then complete modules and systems. The process of developing a product for military use is a long drawn one, typically taking one to two years from concept to induction for the smaller projects. Today we have successfully executed over twenty such projects.

While the pace of indigenous development has increased in the years leading up to #MakeInIndia, if our country is to become self reliant in this area, an ecosystem is required. This is because developing defense technology is hard. It consumes a lot of resources and the critical resources are scarce. Just as we moved from manufacturing microcontroller based systems to licensing the technology we developed, I am thinking that we might make a similar shift — from individually executing projects to seeding the ecosystem.