The ‘Make in India’ initiative to drive expansion in the country’s manufacturing sector has been a factor in the government’s vacillations over whether to restrict Chinese vendors in 5G infrastructure (see separate item). But that is only part of the story. The initiative was founded in 2014 as a programme to reduce dependence on imports and foster a strong manufacturing base capable of becoming a major global force by building on a rapidly expanding domestic market.
This is the basis upon which the USA established a dominant manufacturing base from the late nineteenth century onwards, establishing global brands in energy, automotive, food and others, which Japan to an extent emulated through the 1960s to the 1980s, and then most recently China. India, with its population equaling China’s and an economy expanding at around 8% per year, developed similar ambitions.
India had already succeeded in establishing a strong global position and attracting inward investment in technology sectors, especially IT, but a lot of this was around resource-intensive activities such as programming and providing technical support, exploiting the country’s well-educated base of talent in those areas.
It recognized the need to bolster manufacturing and design too, by becoming a major hub attracting investment across 25 identified sectors. The aim was for manufacturing to grow faster than the rest of the economy at a rate of 12-14% per year, seeking to ensure that this broad sector as a whole increased its contribution to GDP to 25% within eight years by 2022, while creating 100m jobs by that time.
Not surprisingly, none of these ambitious objectives have been met within that timescale, and so the target dates have been put back to 2025, but as a rallying call and focus the initiative has had some success. Indeed, the combination of growing tensions with China, and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, have sharpened focus on Make in India over the past year, amplified further by concerns over slippage of 5G roll-out plans. 5G, after all, has been identified as pivotal to expansion across all 25 of those manufacturing and design areas targeted for investment under the initiative.
The pandemic has hit India hard economically, despite the death toll being significantly lighter than in most European countries as well as North America. GDP declined by 10.29% in 2020, slightly more than other significant economies, while neighboring China was the only one actually to expand, by 2.3%. Make in India is seen as critical, not so much for the immediate bounceback from the recession, but to regain strong sustained annual growth, providing a regional counterweight to China and in time overtaking the USA to become the world’s second biggest economy.
India’s major telcos, meanwhile, had been developing their own strategies for independence over 5G. Although in the spirit of Make in India, this was shaped by their own commercial interests and included foreign partners as well, the objective being to avoid the dependence on a handful of major infrastructure vendors that had increasingly dominated preceding generations of cellular.
Indeed, as Wireless Watch reported in October 2020, two of the biggest operators, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, had decided to focus develop their own internal architecture for 5G with early adoption of O-RAN standards. The former announced it would work with both domestic and international partners to develop technology for 5G, as well as home broadband and IoT, aiming to have the equipment manufactured locally where possible.
We noted then that two key infrastructure partners in Jio’s programme were non-Indian – US-based RAN software firm Altiostar and Japan’s NEC. Both of these are participating in the roll-out of Rakuten Mobile’s network in Japan, which has come to be seen as a template for open 5G projects worldwide.
NEC also announced in December 2020 that it had chosen India as the site for its Open RAN laboratory in India to complement its Center of Excellence (CoE) in the UK. NEC said the new facility would accelerate development of its 5G open ecosystem by pre-integrating partner ORAN components to create readymade end-to-end commercial platforms that could then be tailored to individual operators, including Jio. Initial partners included Altiostar, as well as GigaTera and MTI of Taiwan, with NEC planning to expand this ecosystem further and attract emerging players in India.
Then Bharti Airtel, in February 2021, revealed it had been stepping up its efforts on the O-RAN front in collaboration with Qualcomm, working on the latter’s new RAN chip platform, with special focus on deploying 5G-based fixed wireless access (FWA) in a country where traditional fixed broadband coverage is patchy, particularly outside major urban areas.
“Airtel has been a pioneer of new technologies and our networks are fully ready for 5G. We are delighted to have Qualcomm Technologies as a key technology provider in our journey to roll out world-class 5G in India,” said Randeep Sekhon, CTO of Airtel.
India’s MNOs are determined then to hit the ground running with O-RAN, even while the standards and interfaces are still crystallizing, in order to seize control of their ecosystems and drive down prices, as well as shoehorning networks into their local requirements. This will also help stimulate India’s fledgling 5G infrastructure industry and establish it as an international force. There is already evidence this is happening from the country’s telco equipment maker and integrator Sterlite Technologies (STL), which has won orders worth $100m in the Middle East and Africa to construct 5G infrastructure.
One order is from an unspecified UAE telco to bolster its 5G, 4G and fiber infrastructure, using Sterlite’s Opticonn optical interconnect products. Then a telco in North Africa placed a contract to deploy Sterlite’s digital billing solutions for its 7m users. Sterlite is one Indian company hoping to spread its wings further into 5G infrastructure on the back of such business.