Made in India — or Made in the Feed?
Twelve years. One slogan. A thousand timelines. Today the hashtag roars again: #12YearsOfMakeInIndia. Ruling-party feeds glow with factories, chips, phones, and crore-count job tallies. Opposition feeds answer with empty sheds, “jobless growth,” and the charge that India assembles more than it invents. Both sides hire the same weapon. Emotion. Speed. A number without a footnote. Pause. A factory is steel, wages, and invoices. A hashtag is light. One builds. The other sells a feeling of building. Students scroll past both and call it research. That is the trap. Yes — Production Linked Incentive schemes have drawn real money and real payrolls in pockets of electronics, autos, and solar. Industry bodies celebrate investment and export lines. Serious reporting also shows manufacturing’s share of total employment barely moved over a decade, and that gains cluster in a few sectors while the wider shopfloor stays crowded and thin. Both sentences can be true. Propaganda lives by deleting o...
