India, economia, industria
Un’India più giovane sta flettendo i suoi muscoli
industriali
KEITH BRADSHER
Lo sviluppo economico dell’India non si basa più su call
center e programmatori di computer. Nel
2005 oltre i 2/3 dei FDI in India sono stati fatti nel manifatturiero e non nei
servizi. La crescita annuale del manifatturiero al 9%, ed in accelerazione
e trascinato dall’export, sta per raggiungere il +10% dei servizi.
L’export di merci del
manifatturiero negli USA sta crescendo in % più di quello della Cina, anche se parte
da una base molto inferiore.
MA: la produzione
industriale indiana rappresenta 1/5 del PIL Indiano, contro i 2/5 di quello
della Cina.
Il governo indiano ha ristretto i settori protetti a 326
categorie di merci contro le precedenti 20 000, ed ha abbassato i dazi.
La Confindustria
indiana è riuscita a far adottare le più recenti tecniche di produzione snella giapponesi.
Lo stabilimento
Whirlpool di Pune (India) ha una produttività per addetto tra le più alte di
tutto gruppo internazionale.
Diversi gruppi internazionali della manifatturiero stanno
scommettendo sull’India per:
–
le abilità ingegneristiche unite alla conoscenza
dell’inglese delle élite di giovani indiani;
–
in previsione di una grave strozzatura demografica
per la Cina, con conseguente carenza di forza lavoro giovane per le industrie, (per
la diminuzione, dagli anni 1980, delle dimensioni delle famiglie causata dalla
politica di “un solo figlio”);
–
e della crescita di un enorme mercato costituito
dalla popolazione giovane indiana;
La
International Labor Organisation (ILO): fino al 2030 l’India non supererà la
Cina per popolazione totale,
MA nel 2013 avrà più giovani 20-24 anni della Cina; per il
2002 l’India avrà 116 milioni di lavoratori di questa fascia di età contro i 94
milioni della Cina.
GM e Motorola
stano per costruire stabilimenti nel Sud ed Ovest dell’India; progetti di Posco (Sud Corea) e di Mittal Steel (con sede in Olanda) di
grandi impianti siderurgici nell’Est, dove Reliance
(India) costruirà a breve le maggiori centrali elettriche a carbone del mondo.
I grandi gruppi trovano adeguata ai propri obiettivi la forza lavoro indiana.
Nell’Est India, LG nel 2005 ha trovato senza fatica 55 000
concorrenti ai 458 posti di lavoro per l’assemblaggio, con almeno 15 anni di
scuola, e solo l’1% con un anno di esperienza per un salario di $90 al mese.
Invece nelle città del Guangdong, S-E Cina, che produce per
l’export, i salari minimi mensili sono aumentati quest’estate del 18% da $70 a
€100, dopo che le fabbriche hanno fato saper che avevano 1 milione di posti di
lavoro più dei lavoratori disponibili sul mercato. Nelle altre regioni della
Cina le fabbriche hanno molto meno scarsità di forza lavoro, ma sono state
anch’esse costrette ad aumentare i salari.
Tra le maggiori difficoltà allo sviluppo economico indiano
sono le infrastrutture carenti; l’India investe 1$ in strade, porti,
elettricità e strutture fondamentali contro i $7 della Cina. Altri ostacoli
l’estesa corruzione e la maggiore rigidità del mercato del lavoro.
Con una crescita economica dell’11,3% nel secondo trimestre
2006, la Cina ha avuto solo +1% di
inflazione; l’India +8% quest’estate,
dopo tre anni di +8% del PIL.
Un confronto tra i due gruppi automobilistici Hero, indiano,
e Lifan, cinese:
Hero, sobborghi sud di New Delhi, protetto dalla concorrenza
da alti dazi, produce gran parte per il mercato interno. La fabbrica di Gurgaon,
con quote di minoranza di Honda, ha condizioni di lavoro migliori di quelle di
Lifan; salario mensile di $150 + premi fino a $370 il mese; lavoratori
sindacalizzati.
Lifan, di
Chongqing, Ovest Cina, i suoi lavoratori operano in ambienti pieni di fumi
esausti diesel, lavorano con ritmi altissimi, salario mensile $100; i
lavoratori sono acquiescente, le organizzazioni sindacali indipendenti sono
severamente represe; nel 2005 sono riusciti però ad ottenere l’accesso ai premi
per un maggior numero di lavoratori.
Nyt 06-09-01
A
Younger India
Is Flexing Its Industrial Brawn
By KEITH
BRADSHER
PUNE, India
— India’s economic advancement no longer rests on telephone call centers and
computer programmers.
Among villages with thatch-roofed huts and
dirt roads on the outskirts of this city in central India,
John Deere and LG Electronics have recently built factories turning out
tractors and color television sets for sale in India
and for export to the United
States.
In Hazira, in northwestern India, where some residents still rely on camels
to carry traders’ goods, the Essar Group is making steel to be used for ventilation
shafts in Philadelphia, high-rise structural
beams in Chicago and car engine mountings in Detroit.
For decades, India
followed a route to economic development strikingly different from that of
countries like Japan, South Korea or China. While its Asian rivals
placed their bets on manufacturing and exports, India focused on its domestic
economy and grew more slowly with an emphasis on services.
But all that is starting to change.
–
India’s
annual growth in manufacturing output, at 9 percent and accelerating, is close
to catching growth in services, at 10 percent. Exports of manufactured goods to the United
States are now rising faster in percentage terms than China’s,
although from a much smaller base. More
than two-thirds of foreign investment in the last year has gone into
manufacturing in India,
not services.
“Saying we are a back office and China is a factory is a backhanded compliment,”
said Kamal Nath, India’s
minister of commerce and industry. “It’s not really correct.”
Indeed, in interviews at 18 Indian factories
and other businesses in 10 cities and villages scattered across the length and
breadth of the nation, the picture that emerges is of a country being driven by
advances in manufacturing to a much brisker pace of economic growth.
–
A prime reason India is now developing into the world’s next big
industrial power is that a number of global manufacturers are already looking
ahead to a serious demographic squeeze facing China.
Because of China’s “one child” policy, family
sizes have been shrinking there since the 1980’s, so fewer young people will be
available soon for factory labor.
–
India is not expected to pass China in total population until
2030. But India will have more young
workers aged 20 to 24 by 2013; the International Labor Organization predicts
that by 2020, India will have 116 million workers in this age bracket to
China’s 94 million.
India’s
young population will also make it a huge and growing market for years to come,
while the engineering skills and English skills of its educated elite will make
it competitive across a wide range of industries.
So even though India remains a difficult place to do business, several multinationals have been placing
big bets on India in hopes of taking advantage of this shifting global dynamic.
General
Motors and Motorola are preparing to build plants
in western and southern India.
Posco of South
Korea and Mittal
Steel of the Netherlands
have each announced plans to erect giant steel mills in eastern India, where Reliance of India
will soon construct one of the world’s largest coal-fired power plants.
They
are finding India’s
labor force well suited to their goals. When LG set
out in 2005 to fill 458 assembly line
jobs at its factory here at a starting wage of $90 a month, it required
that each applicant have at least 15
years of education — usually high school plus technical college.
Seeking a young work force, the company
decided that no more than 1 percent of
the workers could have had any prior work experience. Despite the
limitation, 55,000 young people met its
criteria for interviews.
“In the villages there is little income,” said
Siddu Matheapattu, 24, in between applying sealant to refrigerator frames.
“Here I can earn more.”
–
By contrast, cities in
the export-oriented Guangdong Province in southeastern China raised monthly minimum wages
this summer by 18 percent, to $70 to $100 a month, after factories reported
that they had one million more jobs than workers to fill them. Factories elsewhere in China face less
severe labor shortages, but they also are being forced to raise wages.
As India
has deregulated its economy, output has gradually accelerated to a growth rate
of 8 percent a year, feeding a national euphoria and a few hopes of someday
even beating China’s
annual growth of more than 10 percent.
Plenty of obstacles remain, however, notably India’s weak infrastructure.
–
China invests $7 on roads,
ports, electricity and other backbones of a modern economy for every dollar
spent by India — and it shows. Ports here are struggling to handle rising exports,
blackouts are frequent and dirt roads are common even in Bangalore, the center of the country’s
sophisticated computer programming industry.
Pervasive
corruption has slowed many efforts to fix these
problems. India’s labor laws, little changed since they were enacted just after
independence in 1947, also continue to discourage companies from hiring
workers, by making it very difficult to
lay off employees even if a company’s fortunes sour or the economy slows.
Still, a new optimism prevails in India,
bordering at times on euphoria.
“The Chinese are very good at copying things,
but Indians believe in quality work, we believe in meeting pollution norms,”
said S. S. Pathania, the assistant general manager of the Hero Honda motorcycle
factory in Gurgaon, 30 miles south of New
Delhi. “I think India
will pass China
very soon.”
An
Unexpected Boom In Manufacturing
Sprawling across more than a square mile next
to a gray tidal estuary, the scale of the Essar
Group’s complex in Hazira is already impressive. Essar has its own port to bring in iron ore and its own large gas-fired power
plant for electricity. At the steel mill, giant buckets pour 150 tons of
molten metal at a time to form slabs 2 yards wide and up to 10 yards long.
But the complex is just starting to grow. Essar is quintupling steel production and
pushing forward a sevenfold increase in
power generation, most of it for sale to a national grid desperately short
of electricity.
Growth
on that scale, especially in industries like steel and power but also in areas
like car parts and household appliances, is what India has long lacked.
–
Industrial production accounts for only a fifth of India’s economic output, compared with
two-fifths of China’s. But this ratio is starting
to rise in India
as manufacturing, led by exports, grows faster than agriculture and even
some service industries.
Until
recently, legislation effectively barred companies with more than 100 employees
from competing in many industries. The laws were intended
to protect tiny businesses in villages, often employing women and minorities;
high tariffs were placed on imports as well.
But a
result was hundreds of thousands of businesses too small to be competitive;
India lags behind even the
impoverished Bangladesh next
door in exports of garments, a big creator of jobs for China. The Indian government has responded by narrowing the list of protected
industries to 326 categories of goods from 20,000 and has lowered tariffs.
Comparing factories in India to their competitors in China, many of the Indian factories
are smaller but some appear more efficient.
India’s
stronger financial system demands higher interest rates than China’s
state-owned banks, making it costlier to hold the
small mountains of components awaiting assembly that are often seen in Chinese
factories. The Confederation of Indian Industry, a national trade group, has
also been highly successful in pushing
companies to adopt the latest Japanese lean manufacturing techniques.
The drawback is that the nation’s
manufacturing boom, built on higher-quality goods made under more modern conditions than in China, is not likely to create as
many factory jobs as India needs.
The Essar steel mill, for example, has been
replacing old, labor-intensive equipment with more modern gear. “We were having
it all done manually, but because the customers demand very high quality, we
have to do it automatically,” yelled Rajesh Pandita, an Essar manager, over the
roar of a house-size machine that was stretching a minivan-size coil of steel
back and forth through large rollers until it was little thicker than plastic
kitchen wrap.
The
Whirlpool factory in Pune uses machines, not people, to fold the steel exteriors of
refrigerators. It has some of the
highest productivity per worker of any Whirlpool factory in the world, with
just 208 line workers producing up to
33,000 refrigerators a month.
Labor
laws, however, discourage flexibility. They still
ban companies from allowing manufacturing workers to put in more than 54 hours
of overtime in a three-month period even if the workers want to earn extra
money. Firing workers is extremely
difficult.
“Companies think twice, 10 times before they
hire new people,” said Sunil Kant Munjal, the chairman of the Hero Group, one
of the world’s largest manufacturers of inexpensive motorcycles.
Hero in Gurgaon, on the southern
outskirts of New Delhi, and its archrival, the Lifan Group in Chongqing, a city in western China, produce comparable motorcycles but the similarity ends there. Hero
markets heavily to its domestic market, protected from foreign competition by
high import tariffs, while Lifan emphasizes exports.
With
scant ventilation, Lifan’s factories are filled with diesel exhaust as workers
test engines and ride finished bikes at breakneck speed out the doors,
zigzagging past co-workers. Hero’s factory in Gurgaon, where Honda holds a
minority stake, has far better safety standards and excellent ventilation.
The
Lifan factory pays less than $100 a month. The heavily unionized Hero factory
pays $150 a month plus bonuses of up to $370 a month; nearly half the workers earn the top bonus, Mr. Pathania said.
Lifan’s
labor force is quiescent — would-be organizers of independent labor unions face
long jail terms or worse in China.
Hero’s workers staged a successful nonviolent protest in 2005 to call for more
contract workers to be eligible for the bonuses as well.
Bad Roads and Blackouts Take a Toll on
Efficiency
But the biggest question mark hanging over the
rise of manufacturing in India
lies in whether the country has enough roads, ports and electricity-generating
plants to move huge quantities of goods and power the factories that make them.
Captain Abhay Srivastava, an operations
manager at India’s
busiest port, was on duty on a recent afternoon when a phone call suddenly came
in from the docks below. An enormous container ship from Qatar needed to
slide 35 feet backward along the privately managed dock at the Nhava Sheva port
near Mumbai to allow another large vessel to squeeze into the dock in front of
it.
Captain Srivastava grabbed his white hard hat
and dashed for the elevator. As soon as he reached the water’s edge, a dozen
laborers in orange jumpsuits began straining to arrange a cat’s cradle of
heavy, five-inch-thick ropes that would allow the ship to use its powerful
winches to pull itself out of the way.
“They are efficient people; they don’t speak a
lot,” said Captain Srivastava, who has visited most of the world’s major ports
either as a ship captain or for port training exercises. “You go to some places
and they just stand around.”
The efficiency of the Nhava Sheva port — it
approaches West Coast ports in the United States
in the number of containers moved per hour — shows that India is
capable of producing world-class facilities.
But big as it is, Nhava Sheva is too small to
handle the crush of traffic. John Deere tractors wait in a container at the
dock for one to four days before being loaded on a ship.
“If this pace of growth continues, we will see
more congestion at the port,” said Raj Kalathur, the managing director and
chief executive of Deere’s operations in India.
Similar worries prevail in Chennai, formerly Madras. “Another four or
five years, we’ll be choked,” said M. Rafeeque Ahmed, the chairman of the
Farida Group, a 9,000-employee shoe manufacturer in Chennai that needs the port
for exports.
Infrastructure improvements are particularly
important because manufacturing companies are buying more and more components
from far-flung suppliers. Making sure all those parts arrive on time requires a
reliable transportation system.
“Manufacturing is no longer done all under one
roof,” said Victor Fung, the chairman of the Li & Fung Group, a large Hong
Kong-based company that buys goods from factories across Asia for sale to
retailers and wholesalers in the United States
and Europe.
Indian officials are talking about expansion.
Planning is under way for new wharves at Nhava Sheva, but the years-long task
of construction has not yet started.
–
China has
faced capacity problems, too. A surge in steel production in early 2004
overwhelmed bulk cargo ports. Inflation quintupled in a year, to 5.3 percent,
as bottlenecks at ports, highways, railroads and elsewhere in China drove up companies’ costs.
The
Chinese response was swift and decisive. The pace
of port investment nearly tripled in six months. Work crews labored around the
clock to erect more cranes and expand wharves.
–
The Chinese economy grew at a breathtaking pace of 11.3 percent in
the second quarter of 2006, but consumer prices were just 1 percent higher in
July than a year earlier.
–
By contrast, India is
struggling with 8 percent inflation this summer as bottlenecks have appeared
after three years of 8 percent growth.
Belatedly, India’s roads and ports are
improving. Just four years ago, Sona Koyo Steering Systems, an auto parts
manufacturer, incurred hefty financing costs to keep a month’s inventory on
hand in case deliveries were delayed. Now its factory in Gurgaon makes six
deliveries a day to a nearby Maruti car assembly plant; the eight-mile drive
takes an hour or more because of traffic jams, but the deliveries get through.
“I’m not going to deny infrastructure is bad,”
said Surinder Kapur, Sona’s chairman and managing director. “But a lot of our
vendors are around us, a lot of our customers are close to us.”
India is
also starting to address chronic power shortages. But it is still a serious
problem in northern India,
where Mr. Kapur has his steering systems factory. He receives electricity from
the national grid just seven or eight hours a day. So the factory has three
enormous diesel generators, one bigger than a typical Manhattan
living room, operating at four times what an industrial user in the United States
usually pays.
Despite such obstacles, India’s
manufacturing sector appears poised for further growth. In a country where the
national symbol has shifted from government bureaucrats at aging desks to call
center operators in cubicles, it looks as if the next icon will be the
laptop-toting engineer on a factory floor.
“The old philosophy was, ‘I should work in an
office, come in at 10 and leave at 4,’ ” said Nitin Kulkarni, 35, an engineer
at the Hazira steel mill. But in recent years, he added, “there has been a
revolution.”
The New York Times