Rakesh Wadhwa:

The question is with respect to the geopolitical changes this pandemic is driving. China was the outsourcing capital of the world and a lot of high end tech world was being done there. Why do you think that we've been slow to beat and respond to this opportunity? And where does this pandemic offers us an opportunity that we should not miss? And what should we be doing?

 

Rajeev Karwal:

I do not participate too much in CII, FICCI and many other forums because I'm a little bit disenchanted and kind of disappointed. Because when we started off we when to them and we wanted to reach out to the government than other places. So the understanding of this technology what it can do and how we can be more competitive is missing. There were people who even said that we should not use the word robots. We should call it smart manufacturing or we should call it by some other name like automation et cetera et cetera because the government or other people or many other vested interests in the society are worried about job losses and votes and things like that. But you can call it by any other name. A private industry which wants to improve its productivity has to adopt robotic technology. So until and unless we start to have national plans of gaining competitiveness, we will not get anywhere.

Today we don't even have an internet backbone in this country which is high-speed. Which will bring in these technologies and benefits to every nook and corner of this country in the best way possible? And we are dependent on private enterprises. To provide us with the dongles and mobile phones et cetera. So if you want to lead the world you need to have a national strategy. You need to have Political leaders, economic leaders, corporate leaders on the same page whose passion is to get competitiveness and create wealth for this country. If they look at only the next three years or five years or some vested interests, how would you create the kind of industry which some other countries have created?

Our problem is that. Our problem is lack of a national plan on anything which is of tremendous future wins for this nation. Sorry to be saying it but that is the reason why we are not leading the world in robotics.