New manufacturing golden age for India beckons: Tata Sons chief to staff

New Delhi, PTI: With global supply chains continuing to shift in India's favour as the world's largest businesses strike a new balance between resilience and efficiency, manufacturing has the potential to transform the country's economy, Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran said on Thursday. In his New Year message to employees of the salt-to-software conglomerate, Chandrasekaran termed it as "a new manufacturing golden age for India" and said he was looking ahead to 2025 "with a sense of hope and optimism" after 2024, a year marked by the loss of Tata Group Chairman Emeritus Ratan Tata.

"While AI-led breakthroughs in healthcare and mobility can help the whole of humanity, manufacturing has the potential to transform our economy in India," he wrote. Elaborating, he said, "Global supply chains continue to shift in India's favour as the world's largest businesses strike a new balance between resilience and efficiency. What might have seemed like a short-term reaction to the pandemic has proved much more enduring." Amid relentless geopolitical instability, Chandrasekaran said, "The equation has tilted firmly toward resilience and India, with our vast talent pool and growing manufacturing capacity, is poised to benefit." Reiterating Tata Group's plans to create 5 lakh manufacturing jobs over the next half decade, he said these will come in part from investments in facilities across India's "factories and projects that will produce batteries, semiconductors, electric vehicles, solar equipment and other critical hardware destined to play a central role in the economy of tomorrow".

He said ground-breaking ceremonies and construction began at over seven new plants, including India's first semiconductor fab in Dholera, Gujarat, and a brand new semiconductor OSAT plant in Assam. "There is the electronics assembly plant in Narasapura, Karnataka, an automotive plant in Panapakkam, Tamil Nadu, and new MRO facilities in Bengaluru, Karnataka," Chandrasekaran said.

He further said, "We also have new battery cell manufacturing factories in Sanand, Gujarat, and in Somerset, UK. We inaugurated the C295 final assembly line in Vadodara, Gujarat, and began solar module production in TN." The five lakh new jobs will be "in addition to the many services jobs we expect to introduce across retail, tech services, airlines, and hospitality, among other sectors". "Such moves are exciting for our group and for India, but more importantly, they give hope to the one million young people who enter our workforce each month.