Made in china
The Practicalities While You Try Avoiding It
While the US President once thumped his chest to cut-off the trade relations with China, my next door neighbour was in a similar mood when he proudly demonstrated to me how he bought ‘indigenous’ LED smart lights for his living room. His patriotism was not anything less than those of the millions of Indian who want to discard Chinese products today. From news channels to social media, everywhere, we are seeing Indians on the streets demanding that we discard Chinese products.
But can we?
Look around your room and tell me what are the things that you see which are hundred percent made in India. Your own super smart phone, the entertainment system in your luxury car, TV, fridge, computer, table, chair, flower vase, waste basket, that beautiful photo frame that you have in your bedroom, that beautiful wall clock that you and your wife bought last year, your personal watch, the smart and bright lights in your room and everything else? If you go a bit deeper into most of the things that you have, you will find that there are items mostly ‘made‘ in China but ‘assembled‘ in India. Let’s look at some of these items in more details:
Your own Car
I know you are a proud owner of an Indian brand SUV and a German luxury car. Did you ever try looking at the things inside your car that powers it?
- When you roll-up the window of your car with the help of a button on the door, remember that it has a ‘Power Window Assembly’ which is made in China.
- When you switch on the super-white LED headlights in the dark, remember that the headlights are manufactured in China.
- Do you remember how many times you felt good looking at the DRL (Daytime Running Light) of your car and thought how jealous your neighbours are? Please take a note that those DRLs come directly from China. You can purchase them on any online platform if you want to decorate your not-so-new car.
- Oh, did I tell you that the SRS (Supplemental Restraint System) Airbag System in your car is manufactured in China? The SRS makes you and your family feel so safe in that car, isn’t it?
But, the leatherette (not really the leather) seat that you have on your SUV is ‘probably’ made in India. Happy? But, the pure leather seat that you have on your German car is made in China. Sad again?
The Smart LED lights that you have in your bedroom
You feel so satisfied that you recently bought those smart LED lights from some leading Indian brands. You make them bright, change the colors and do a dozen other things using the app that you have on your Smart Phone. Not only smart LED lights, during Diwali, we light our house with those beautiful bright lights with different colors, all with switches to controls the patterns. How fancy is that. But how much do you know about that Smart LED light or the light strips that we buy so cheap from the electric shops?
- Smart lights have two distinct components in them – the hardware and the software.
- The light itself is powered by, what we call LED SMDs (Surface Mounted Device). These are basically semiconductor chips primarily manufactured in China.
- Couple of years back, we used to get fully assembled LED lights from China. But we have improved ourselves to some extent.
- The Indian companies now buy those SMDs in bulk from China and assemble them in India into plastic packages.
- The software that makes the light ‘smart’ is made in India but largely supported by the platform leaders like Google and Amazon.
- So, what you see and believe as an indigenous product has it’s core technology manufactured in China.
Question that we all should ask ourselves, is why can’t we manufacture those LED SMDs in India? Now that there are plenty of entrepreneurship programs supported directly by the Finance ministry, how many are ready to venture into this? Not many, I would say. We, as Indians are not yet ready to explore ‘core’ manufacturing technologies. We are good at assembling things. Let’s look at another example.
The CCTVs that are there on the roads and in your house
As part of the Smart City initiative, most of the State Governments have implemented Close Circuit TVs to monitor crime in the city. Excellent initiative to save the citizens from the criminals. You have also installed CCTVs in and around your house, right? You feel good to look at your house safe on your smart phone app when you are miles away. However, I see couple of issues here. Most of these CCTV cameras are directly imported from China and the technology that runs behind them are also developed by China. Let’s look at the details:
CCTV - The hardware
- The core of every CCTV camera is the sensor that captures still images constantly so as to produce a moving video. There are two types of sensors – (a) CCD – Charged Couple Device and (b) CMOS – Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor. Newer CCTV cameras use CMOS based sensors which are capable to capturing more light and higher density pixels.
- Now these sensors are primarily manufactured in China. Even the big camera brands like Nikon, Canon, Sony etc., they get them manufactured in China.
- What remains after the sensor, are the electronics which processes the images and transmits them over a WiFi network. All of them work very tightly with each other and these come ‘pre-assembled’ in China.
CCTV - The software
- The CCTV hardware will eventually transmit the data over a network and send it to your smart phone. This is where the software comes into picture.
- Most of the Chinese manufacturers give that software as part of the selling package to Indian importers. What this means is that the technology is solely governed by those Chinese companies.
- If you have noted, while you setup your CCTV camera with your WiFi and smart phone, you have to create a user account somewhere on the cloud you have no idea about.
- Remember, every frame that is captured from your CCTV camera goes into the cloud. We don’t know if that cloud is storing those images, doing some analysis on them, using them for some other purposes or they are just passing them to your phone.
- So, the scariest part of this entire CCTV thing is compromising security using a security system itself.
Like the examples above, all the important components like LED TV Panels, printer heads, the printed circuit boards in your Air Conditioners, the chip in your TV remote – everything is made in China.
Enough gyan. What should we do then?
If we truly want to become self-sufficient in producing products, we need to be producing those core products first. We need to setup manufacturing plants which can produce ‘Quality’ products at a cost less or equal to what China can offer us. However, a lot of business houses will still prefer to buy from China then setting up a plant in India. The major issues of setting up a plant in India are more than well known:
- Availability of skilled and cheap labour
- Creating a plant free from dust and humidity
- Flexible labour laws and minimising conflicts
- Creation of high demand so as to push the production higher resulting in lower cost of finished goods
We also need to look at creating a regulatory framework to enable lower tax on fully indigenous products. The State Governments, while implementing Smart City technologies, must make it a point that all the technologies used must be from India only and nothing from outside, even a screw can’t be imported.