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India Insider: Manufacturing Strategy to Create Rural Jobs

by with No Comment BusinessFeatured HighlightsIndia

India Insider: Manufacturing Strategy to Create Rural Jobs

Across much of India’s rural landscape, manufacturing remains scarce and finding a solution for this remains a priority. While some towns do have small scale industries that offer jobs, this is still limited. As of financial year 2023, agriculture accounts for only 16% of India’s GDP, down sharply from around 35% in the 1990s, due to a structural shift toward services and manufacturing.

A large share of rural families still depend on agriculture, often engaging in farming and irrigation with modern equipment. However, marketing their produce remains a persistent challenge. Meanwhile, many rural workers are engaged in low-wage trade and commerce, often in informal settings such as small shops and roadside businesses. These roles typically offer limited income and little upward mobility. Falling real wages have pushed many to migrate to India’s urban centers or venture overseas to Singapore, Malaysia, and the Gulf countries in search of better livelihoods, aided by favorable exchange rates.

Capitalism and Efficient Manufacturing

Adam Smith, in his seminal work The Wealth of Nations wrote that, ‘it is not by gold or silver, but by labor that all the wealth of nations is created’. This fundamental idea underpins the modern economic thought that wealth is not derived merely from money, but from the productive capacity of people.

When capital is invested in a capitalist enterprise, it generates profits for the owner, provides wages for employees, and delivers returns (such as dividends) for shareholders. But this cycle of value creation depends on active and efficient enterprise, particularly manufacturing which has been missing or underdeveloped in many parts of rural India.

Unlike countries such as the United States, where people readily relocate across States, India faces some unique challenges. Like the European Union, India is a union of diverse linguistic and cultural regions. It is uncommon for a small business owner from Himachal Pradesh to directly access markets in Tamil Nadu or Karnataka due to language barriers, cultural differences, and logistical constraints. These frictions further isolate rural producers from wider markets.

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Garment Industry Values in India, Bangladesh and Vietnam

Strategic Solutions and the Role of State Governments

To revive rural economies, business people along with their state governments must identify and invest in strategic sectors that create jobs and add value. Kerala is a fine example: as one of India’s top spice-producing States, Kerala has the potential to establish local industries focused on spice processing, packaging, and export. Coordination between agriculture and manufacturing can generate employment, stimulate local economies, and enhance foreign exchange earnings.

Albert Hirschman, a development economist, highlighted this approach through his theory of unbalanced growth and economic integration. He argued that certain industries have strong reciprocal connections with other parts of the economy. By prioritizing sectors with good synergy potential, developing countries can achieve significant growth even with limited resources.

Growing competition from countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam which both enjoy favorable trade agreements do pose new challenges, this must be taken seriously by India and create a focus on forward looking international commerce. There will always be competition from distant enterprises and nations, this must be accepted and planned for via commercial insights.

Within India is Tiruppur, a city in Tamil Nadu, known as the ‘Manchester of South India’ due to its vibrant textile industry. The city has created an ecosystem of manufacturing that consistently offers higher real wages compared to other towns in the region. It has successfully shifted labor from agriculture to industry, thereby increasing productivity and income. It is a bright example and defines one way to make progress.

Protecting New Industries and Creation of Success

In his book How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor, economist Erik Reinert argues that nations develop not just by doing what they are currently good – such as agriculture or mining, but by nurturing industries that can become more productive long-term. Typically manufacturing and technology sectors lead to greater innovation and economic resilience.

Reinert provides numerous examples, like South Korea’s emerging growth in steel and its automotive industries, and Ireland’s rise in information technology where specific protections and support for young industries has led to long-term prosperity.

India’s rural transformation cannot rely on New Delhi alone. State governments along with business people must take the lead by identifying sectors that have the potential to foster high growth and employment. Helping to create local value chains, investing in infrastructure, training, and market access will build resilience in these communities. By encouraging small-scale manufacturing and leveraging regional strengths, the country’s rural areas can become engines of economic growth.

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Dangerous and Unpredictable Duties During the Vietnam War

by with No Comment BooksCultureFeatured Highlights

Dangerous and Unpredictable Duties During the Vietnam War

Book Corner: Policing Saigon, written by Loren Christensen.

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War stories have always fascinated the public, ranging from Erich Maria Remarque’s

World War One novel All Quiet on the Western Front, to Alistair MacLean’s World War Two thriller The Guns of Navarone, up to the more recent American Sniper,

Chris Kyle’s autobiography of his combat experience in Iraq. Ex-cop and noted martial artist Loren Christensen throws his hat into the ring with Policing Saigon, the story of his

year as a military policeman patrolling the capital city of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Told mostly as a series of vignettes, Policing Saigon is at times dark-humored, shocking, sad, grisly, and even touching. (A note about terminology – in 1975 Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, and in 1976 South Vietnam merged with North Vietnam to become simply Vietnam.)

A cop in Portland, Oregon for 25 years, and a karate practitioner since his teens, Christensen is known mostly for a series of well-regarded policing and martial arts books. In Policing Saigon, he tells his story slowly and methodically. Growing up in suburban Washington state, his goal in college in the late 60’s was to break into radio and theater. Christensen took the initiative of enlisting, viewing the military police as an experience to draw upon for the acting world and incorrectly thinking that MP volunteers don’t receive overseas assignments (he notes that he was lied to by the recruiter).

After basic training, Christensen went through the range of military police courses such as language school and dog training. But after landing in Saigon in 1969, the 23-year old quickly realized that he was unprepared for the tough and thankless job. The MPs worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week that often went hours into overtime in a sprawling, stifling hot and dirty city, hit hard by the war. The roads were clogged with haphazard and unregulated traffic that resulted in frequent accidents, some of which Christensen witnessed and some in which he was involved. The city was known for wretched poverty and was full of beggars, often children forced by their parents. The pollution was so severe – and the humidity was so brutal – that he developed both respiratory and fungal infections that took months into his discharge to heal.

The job was dangerous and unpredictable. The military police were hated by everyone, especially by those that were sympathetic to the Vietcong. The hate extended even to American GIs, since the MPs were often called in to arrest violent and drunken soldiers letting off steam on leave from the jungle. Christensen and his partners were also frequently called in to arrest AWOL (absent without leave) GIs, who flocked to Saigon in staggering numbers. He writes that in his tenure the number of AWOL soldiers never dipped below eighteen hundred. The American soldiers did not always go quietly and often resisted arrest, sometimes turning the scene into a brawling and bloody mess where the MPs needed backup.

As Christensen writes, the military police were also sitting ducks for all forms of terror, the perpetrators of which were impossible to catch. Snipers were liable to pick at them from nearby rooftops or windows, or bombs could be placed quickly and inconspicuously inside the military jeeps – even by children. Their job sometimes had them chasing thieves down dangerous, narrow, and winding alleys, frazzling their nerves and keeping them on edge. Even worse, as he writes, off-duty MPs were often unable to truly relax. Nighttime brought the sounds of artillery from the war’s front lines, serving as an uneasy and troubling background noise. Other MPs reacted to the stress of the war and their job in a number of ways. One of his early roommates casually kept a live python in a locker, mere meters from Christensen’s bed. Another inexplicably began shooting from the MP barrack’s balcony towards a truck transporting America’s allies, the South Vietnamese soldiers.

Crime against the American soldiers was rampant. Christensen writes that gangs of local thieves devised creative ways to steal from the American supply trucks, fueling the black market. Riding on motorbikes behind and alongside the trucks, they performed gravity-defying gymnastics while in motion as they would grab merchandise off the vehicle and speed off before unsuspecting driver realized what happened. Other crimes involved hookers. Sex-starved soldiers on leave would follow a hooker down an alley for a quick hookup and would instead be robbed. Others would actually engage in the act in the hooker’s room, while under the bed an unseen partner-in-crime (sometimes the girl’s mother) would reach out and pluck a few bills from the unsuspecting soldier’s wallet.

There are touching moments in the book, if one can call it that. Christensen isn’t a touchy-feely guy and his descriptions of these interactions come across as matter-of-fact and straight-forward. He writes of his admiration for the mainstream Saigon residents, mostly decent people trying hard to eke out a living. He notes their survivors’ mentality, and describes as they shrug off hardships and get back on their feet. In another chapter, he writes of meeting a group of cute Vietnamese kids, friendly and smiling to the MPs. But they were basically homeless street urchins living a hard life, sadly sleeping in a nearby cemetery. He writes of saying goodbye to his parents before shipping out to the army, facing an unknown future. And in one of the book’s most touching moments, he writes of his homecoming a year later, sitting quietly in his childhood room, the horrors of the war behind him.

Christensen was discharged in mid-1970 and less than 48 hours later was back home, a transition that was so fast it was jarring. He writes of his difficulty in adjusting to civilian life, suffering from PTSD until the return to martial arts would quiet his soul. He would later draw upon his MP experience for his police career, viewing it at five years’ experience combined into one year. A brown belt in karate at the time of his service, he realized that a more realistic and practical street-fighting style was needed, which he later taught privately and also to the police and military.

Christensen would be the first to admit that this not a book of heroics. This is not Band of Brothers or The Sands of Iwo Jima. But he took his job and his service in an unpopular war very seriously. The book clocks in at over 300 pages but his stories will hook you in. A worthwhile and moving read.

If you want to read another Book Corner article, please visit this review by Evan Rothfeld: https://www.angrymetatraders.com/post/ten-more-ok-now-twenty-finish-thirty-next-run-the-hill.