'Make in India' has become 'Make-believe in India', alleges Congress

Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said the GDP growth figures released three days back for the quarter July-Sept 2024 revealed a "dramatic fall".

New Delhi: The Congress on Monday said that the fall in the GDP numbers for the last quarter highlights the "unimpressive" manufacturing growth and the failure of 'Make in India' which, it claimed, has become 'Make-believe in India'.

Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh, in a statement, said the GDP growth figures released three days back for the quarter July-Sept 2024 revealed a "dramatic fall".

Equally noteworthy and concerning is that manufacturing growth slowed to a shocking 2.2 per cent, he said, lamenting that export growth has also decelerated to 2.8 per cent.

"The data belies the dismal reality of the prime minister's decade-old promise to make India a new global hub for manufacturing exports.

"The unfortunate reality is that ten years after the Government's flagship Make in India scheme was launched, India's manufacturing is stagnating, and our exports are faltering," Ramesh claimed in his statement, a day after party leader Rahul Gandhi raised similar concerns.

The BJP has alleged that the Congress' attempt to "paint a picture of economic doom with selective data and half-truths" is misleading. BJP leader Amit Malviya said that "crying foul over a 5.4 per cent GDP growth rate is laughable when it is one of the highest globally".

"Your persistent doom-mongering is not just baseless but reflects an inability to acknowledge progress," Malviya said while refuting Gandhi's criticism.

Ramesh claimed that the share of manufacturing in India's Gross Value Added has fallen from 18.1 per cent in 2011-12 to 14.3 per cent in 2022-23 and the number of manufacturing workers has fallen from 51.3 million in 2017 to 35.65 million in 2022-23.

He said India's share in global merchandise exports has also largely stagnated, and exports are falling as a share of India's GDP.

"In fact, growth in India's share of global exports grew much faster in the 2005-15 period, largely corresponding to Dr. Manmohan Singh's tenure as Prime Minister," he claimed.

In the all-important employment-intensive sectors like garments, exports have fallen from $15 billion in 2013-14 to $14.5 billion in 2023-2024 and India has been left way behind by countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam, he claimed.

"These depressing results are ultimately a result of the Modi Government's failure to boost private investment in manufacturing. The hype over tax cuts and production-linked incentives does not match the reality.

"Further, in sector after sector evidence has piled up on how continued cheap imports from China are destroying Indian manufacturing - over a third of MSMEs in the stainless steel production industry in Gujarat alone are lying closed on account of such imports from China. There are numerous such instances," the Congress leader claimed.

"Make in India has simply become Make-Believe in India," Ramesh alleged.

India's economic growth slowed to a near two-year low of 5.4 per cent in the July-September quarter of this fiscal due to poor performance of manufacturing and mining sectors as well as weak consumption, but the country continued to remain the fastest-growing large economy, data showed on Friday.

The gross domestic product (GDP) had expanded by 8.1 per cent in the July-September quarter of the 2023-24 fiscal and 6.7 per cent in the first quarter of the current fiscal (April-June 2024).

The previous low level of GDP growth at 4.3 per cent was recorded in the third quarter (October-December 2022) of the financial year 2022-23.

The data also showed that the growth of private final consumption expenditure (PFCE), which indicates consumer spending, decelerated to 6 per cent in the September quarter from 7.4 per cent in April-June this year.