TVS Motor’s Venu Srinivasan says India must bridge quality gap to make ‘Made in India’ a mark of trust

India’s next manufacturing challenge was not just to make products more competitively, but to make them globally trusted for their quality, design and innovation, Venu Srinivasan, chairman of the Indian Foundation for Quality Management (IFQM) and chairman emeritus of TVS Motor Company, said on Monday.

Speaking at the annual IFQM Symposium 2026, Srinivasan said India had made progress, with several domestic companies already meeting international quality standards. But he said the country still had significant ground to cover if it wanted to secure a larger share of global manufacturing and services.

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“We have a long, long way to go because we have benchmarks in the world from Korea, China, Japan that we have to meet and exceed if you want a fair share of global manufacturing and products and services to come to India,” Srinivasan said.

From cost to quality

Srinivasan said India’s ambition of becoming a developed economy by 2047 could not rest solely on cost competitiveness. The country needed to put greater emphasis on innovation, products and design to build globally competitive businesses.

He said India needed to reach a point where consumers and businesses overseas chose Indian products because they associated them with quality and reliability.

“The Germans stood for quality... came Japan, Korea, China, and India has to very soon get on that bandwagon where you can buy an Indian product because it’s a trusted product,” he said, calling this “the most important challenge” for the country.

The shift would require Indian companies to compete against manufacturing economies that had already established strong reputations for quality and product excellence.

The quality race keeps moving

Srinivasan also said improving quality was a continuous process, as companies, products, processes and services were repeatedly overtaken by newer waves of development.

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“We have seen how companies have come in waves, products, processes, services, and have been overtaken by the next wave,” he said, adding that businesses needed to understand the process as continuous.

While India already had companies that had achieved international standards, Srinivasan said the broader challenge was to make such quality and competitiveness more widespread across the economy.

Tata Sons Executive Chairman N Chandrasekaran also addressed the symposium but declined to interact with the media, as per ANI.

(With inputs from ANI)