Electronics industry and India

[Raj]

Everyone keeps talking about how in India, people don't get engineering jobs easily but i'll be the only one to talk why.

Its like a cycle, if good things aren't made, it won't get popular...thus the company won't grow, thus less people gets employed....thus good things aren't made

Unless we have design and specs, handed to us in a plate, we make absolute s#!#

In india Since Jugaar tech rules....if you were to allow non engineers into this, sure, you'll see wack and weird  new technology but all of them will be super unsafe and non durable.But most of them will be a copy of someone's project.

In-fact, the locally produced domestic electronics are exactly that. Even electronics that these guys repair, gets unsafe, cause they bypass all fuses, remove all decoupling caps if any one of the tantalums gets short, loose wires hand around in the breeze and no one gives a F#. Good thing, our houses are made of brick and don't burn down.

most of us are dishonest. We have a mantra that, if it could go bad and cause problems after warranty expires....its a good idea...(how the F did my font go red? I don't know, it happened after random keyboard mashing.)

Here are some examples of Sh!t we make-
-Transformers with wires who's insulation deteriorate into powder
-Door bells with solenoid that burns out in a second
-tank water level sensor that could electrify the whole city's plumbing if it gets short
-soldering irons that can and do blow up in your hands
-electronics that looks like a student projects and is as unsafe as one
-Led bulbs that blow themselves into peaces because of exploding caps
-Our injection moulding processes are sh##
-scams like power factor corrector, stupid (non)healing stuff



now to more onto the positive side...Here's stuff we make that work nicely-
-Electric vehicles from motorcycle parts
-retrofitting kits for automating manual machines, like hand crank sewing machines, riksha etc
-Computer peripherals, Our keyboards are the best....
-Good transformers (if you pay em the right amount  and provide them with your own materials)
-dirt cheap electronics, like TVs,computers and mobile
-anything that was designed in a foreign country, gets copied here but at dirt cheap prices.
-aerospace and aviation equipment at dirt cheap prices



Funny that things like this make it to the mainstream media coverage-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZICaswopF8

[cdev]

India is missing the middle class that should be there. So they sort of pretend that a better off slice of still very poor Indians are middle class.

This gap is really quite striking. Just for my own edification I like to fool around with data visualization and sometimes make animations with the data. A direct comparison between India and China over the last two decades shows China's middle class growing rapidly but India's middle class remaining the same or even shrinking, relative to the huge number of poor and especially the wealthy, whose share of the wealth keeps increasing.

Whatever they are doing there, they are doing it wrong! One has to see the irony when even the most conservative economics publications point to India as an example of failures of neoliberalism to benefit the developing world! (This is likely not by choice, its because they had lost a lot of credibility by denying this was the case in the past, but at this point its undeniable.)

I realize that I, an American should not be lecturing anybody about rapidly growing inequality. (for which the US seems to be sort of a poster child among developed nations)

However, it seems to me that India occupies a similar position among developing nations. We should try to move away from the Global Value Chains model which is a rigged system that nobody can win, and instead countries like India should try to optimize their economy to create learning opportunities and good jobs for everybody even if that comes at a cost in efficiency.

Of course to do this we'll have to dump the pesky WTO (GATS) rules and increase public services like public higher education and allow state subsidized local job training programs, such as the ones installing solar panels in Uttar Pradesh the US India dispute several years ago was over!

Also, sometimes the old saying 'necessity is the mother of invention' holds true, so a good way to see the poverty experience can sometimes be that it can be very helpful in helping people to see solutions where most think there are none, but it also very very often leads to huge tragedies when 'for want of a nail a kingdom is lost'. That especially applies in fields like health.