‘Every hour, 105 posts are put out on MII by people in 21-35 age group’
By Arun S
The Make In India (MII) digital campaign — launched on September 25 last year by the Modi government with the objective of turning the country into a global manufacturing hub — has managed to create a buzz, especially among the youth. Every hour, 105 posts are put out on MII by people in the 21-35 age group online, according to the first ‘six-month report’ of the campaign.
In the report, the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) – the nodal department for MII – said the campaign garnered a whopping 4.6 billion global digital ‘impressions’. An ‘impression’, the report said, is an estimate of the number of people a post is reaching and the number of times where the post appears is shown.
Growth in gross value added (GVA) in manufacturing picked up from 3.6% in Q3 to a robust 8.4% in Q4. For the whole fiscal of FY15, growth was 7.1% compared with 5.3% in FY14.
NR Bhanumurthy, professor, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, said though MII is a good public relations campaign and a long-term strategy to increase the share of manufacturing in GDP (from 16% to 25% in a decade) and create 100 million jobs, the current ground level realities are not conducive.
“The manufacturing sector is facing supply side bottlenecks. Besides, there is a demand constraint domestically and globally. There is excess capacity in India and other emerging markets. Then there are constraints faced by companies in India in doing business and getting crucial inputs. Also, there is a debate on whether MII should be export focused or cater to the domestic market,” he said, adding that the import substitution strategy may not help India as the country depends on imports. “For the sake of MII, we can’t end up being uncompetitive,” he said.
FDI inflow also increased since the MII initiative was launched, DIPP’s report said. FDI inflows during October 2014-March 2015 were $23.33 billion, an increase of 37% from $17.05 billion in the same period a year ago. Since a key objective of the campaign is to attract more FDI inflows, it is “resonating with the right audience as over 60% of discussions (on MII) have happened outside India,” the report found.
The campaign has resulted in 3.4 million ‘fans’ for it on Facebook, an equal number of ‘followers’ on Twitter, 2.9 million ‘views’ on Youtube and over nine million ‘pageviews’ of the MII website. In the social media globally, there were around 8 lakh posts on MII.
The report has an overview of the MII conversations online, citywise discussions, analysis of Twitter hashtags, online news media and social media channels, Youtube, MII website, MII mentions under key events of PM Narendra Modi and influencers (influential people, bloggers and opinion leaders who impacted the MII campaign).
In the region-wise analysis, the US topped with 44,355 mentions (meaning, a particular post, tweet, retweet and reply where keywords mentioned are related to the MII campaign) and 96.7 million impressions, followed by UK (13,073 mentions and 45.5 million impressions). Within India there were 291,565 mentions and 1.3 billion impressions with the maximum from Delhi (34,006 and 388.7 million).
The positive discussions were around restrictions on Chinese products and smart city projects, while negative discussions revolved around Nokia’s Tamil Nadu plant closure and the Union Budget measures. “Most were interested in FDI regulations and exemptions related discussions,” the report said, adding that 5 out of 10 MII posts were related to the IT industry and defence. The report said people discussing pollution based issues believed FDI in autoparts and textiles would indirectly increase pollution and so the government should come up with an environment protection policy.