View: From ‘Make in India’ to ‘Design in India’

India’s automotive market is the third largest in the world. Yet, the debate continues along a familiar binary: Indian brands vs foreign technology. No carmaker in the world builds a vehicle entirely on its own.

Cells, semiconductors, software and design capability are bought, licensed or developed with partners, in India and everywhere else. So, whether a technology is Indian or foreign tells you less than it appears to. The more useful question is what happens to it after it arrives here.

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Does it stay a licence and a set of imported parts? Or does it become engineering capability the company owns? That is the difference between assembling a vehicle and owning its architecture, and it will decide who leads this industry.

India has built world-class capabilities over four decades through continuous learning, adaptation, and innovation. When Maruti Udyog partnered Suzuki in 1982, the country gained more than a small car. It gained lean manufacturing, quality systems and a method of developing vendors that did not exist here at the time, and an entire component industry grew up around it.

Tata Motors owned the Indica platform while drawing on styling support from Italian design firm I.DE.A Institute. Mahindra worked with Ford, and later Renault, and carried that learning into vehicles of its own. Each of them learned from the best available and then made the knowledge its own.

What has to be learned has changed. A vehicle is now defined by its battery, power electronics and software. Mechanical refinement, which we spent four decades mastering, is no longer where value sits. Skills that made us competitive in the internal combustion era do not carry over on their own.

China has built the only complete battery value chain, from raw material to cells, battery management systems and packs, and Chinese manufacturers hold more than 75% of global installed EV battery capacity. Tesla showed how battery engineering, software, updates and charging can be designed as one system rather than assembled from parts. If Indian companies want to build new energy vehicles of global standard, that is where the knowledge sits, and there is no reason to be defensive about going to get it.

There is one difference between then and now that matters. In the past, partnership was not a choice. Policy required foreign entrants to work with an Indian company, and much of what we learned came through arrangements the industry did not design. That is no longer the case. A company today chooses its own partner and decides for itself what it wants out of the arrangement.

So, existence of a partnership says very little about a company. What it does with that partnership says a great deal. Technology that is only bought must be bought again with every product cycle. Technology that is understood, taken apart, tested and rebuilt is something a company carries into the next programme and the one after.

The second requires investment in the parts of the business that are slow to show returns. R&D funded through cycles rather than switched on and off in response to demand. Ownership of vehicle architecture and validation, enabling a company to set its own product logic. Manufacturing depth in cells, power electronics and thermal systems, not only in final assembly. Suppliers developed here, the way Maruti built the component industry in the 1980s, because a domestic supply base is what makes cost and quality controllable. And engineers who have run the tests and lived through the failures, because design judgement does not transfer on paper.

The market is already showing which approach works. In July, Tata Motors and Mahindra together accounted for more than 65% of India's EV registrations, Tata at 41.4% and Mahindra at 23.8%. Neither built that position in a hurry. Both spent years on iteration, with capital committed long before returns were visible. The policy framework already exists. What it needs is companies willing to use it to build platforms rather than to make imports cheaper.

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The purpose of all this is straightforward. An industry that only assembles depends on decisions taken elsewhere about cost, supply and timing. One that owns its architecture and its supply base decides those things for itself. In the internal combustion era, India needed access to technology to learn. In the electric era, it must absorb that technology to decide its own future.

Partnership is the sensible way in. Ownership has to be the destination. That is the move from ‘Make in India’ to ‘Design in India’.

(Arunachalam is faculty advisor, ISB iVenture. Nayak is CEO, JSW Motors)