The ‘Make in India’ initiative aims at making the country a global manufacturing hub and has renewed confidence within business communities around the world. Since becoming the chief executive of the Government of India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been branding the country as the foremost place to create products for the global market. In less than a year as PM, he has been on official trips to Brazil, Japan, the U.S., and Australia to sell the Indian dream and convince global companies to manufacture here.

Manufacturing currently accounts for 16% of India’s GDP, which is smaller than the average for lower-middle-income countries. The national manufacturing policy within the ‘Make in India’ campaign wants to increase this and make it account for 25% by 2022. For manufacturing to take place, there needs to be industrial development, and the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion is the nodal agency that is doing just that – making India a favoured destination for manufacturing, with specific focus on facilitating investment, fostering innovation and enhancing skill development.

Industries within the manufacturing sector, such as textiles, mining, automotive, infrastructure, real estate, oil and gas, and power, are skill or labour intensive, and on developing such industries, jobs do get created. According to a recent McKinsey Report, India’s manufacturing has the potential to create up to 90 million jobs by 2025. Make in India’s campaign to promote manufacturing in India should go hand in hand with a systemic process of skilling India’s labour force with industry-matched vocational training. There is a need for machinists, mechanists, fitters, welders, plumbers, electricians, draughtsman, and technicians to work in the factories that push forward manufacturing. This workforce needs to be world-class, and armed with skills that can compete globally. As Dilip Chenoy, CEO of National Skill Development Corporation and regular speaker of One Globe, says, 90% of India’s labour force is in the unorganised sector and this segment is largely untouched by any kind of formal skill training.

On top of this, there is constant rhetoric of India’s youth being unemployable and several surveys have suggested that over half of India’s graduates are not equipped with the skills required by companies that are looking to hire them.

To make India a global manufacturing hub, India should not focus solely on policies and processes to facilitate investment and set up factories. A robust and systematic approach to skill development is required to ensure companies have access to an employable labour force to “man” the manufacturing process. The three key elements that can allow India to become an investment destination, drive innovation amongst the youth, and propel the ‘Make in India’ campaign according to Anurag Thakur at the One Globe 2014, are education, employment, and empowerment.