Column | Scale Has Given India Presence; Capability Can Give India Leadership: Nyarika Holkar

Every Independence Day invites us to look back at how far we have come as a nation. It should also prompt us to ask what the country now requires of our generation. The generation that won India’s freedom secured political sovereignty. Those that followed built institutions, industries and infrastructure, and expanded opportunity at a scale once unimaginable.

Our responsibility is different. We must convert that scale into deeper capability: the ability to solve harder problems, create greater value and build institutions that the world can trust. For me, this idea is personal. In my family, conversations about business were rarely only about business. They were about the role enterprise could play in solving real problems and contributing to India’s progress.

The Godrej story began in 1897. Our founders, Ardeshir and Pirojsha Godrej, brought complementary strengths to building the enterprise. Ardeshir was the inventor, driven by the conviction that Indian enterprise could create products that could compete with the best in the world. Pirojsha was the institution-builder, giving that pioneering spirit the systems, scale and continuity to endure. Their roles reflected two essential ingredients of progress: the ability to imagine what does not yet exist, and the ability to build institutions capable of carrying that vision forward.

India has already demonstrated that it can grow at scale. We have built one of the world’s largest economies, transformed digital access, expanded manufacturing and created opportunities that would have seemed impossible a generation ago. But scale is a platform, not a destination.

The next phase of India’s growth will depend on the quality and depth of what we build. It will be defined not only by how much we produce, but by the complexity of the problems we can solve; not only by the size of our markets, but by the value we create within them. Capability, in this sense, is the accumulated ability to solve harder problems originally, reliably and at scale.

This shift is especially important for manufacturing. India must move from volume to value: from making components to engineering complete systems; from executing specifications to helping define them; from adopting technology to creating and owning it.

Our own journey, from designing locks to contributing precision-engineered systems for space, aviation and clean energy, has reinforced one lesson. Industrial capability is rarely built through a single breakthrough. It is accumulated over time by repeatedly taking on challenges of greater complexity. This requires precision, quality and reliability.

In a world shaped by geopolitical uncertainty, climate risk and technological disruption, countries are choosing partners not only on cost or capacity, but on whether they can deliver consistently and be trusted over the long term. This is India’s opportunity: not simply to become a larger manufacturing base, but to become an indispensable engineering and innovation partner to the world.

Design will be central to that shift. We often associate design with aesthetics. In reality, good design begins with understanding a problem deeply enough to solve it the simplest way possible. It is where engineering meets human need. As India moves up the value chain, our ability to design, not only manufacture, will increasingly define our competitiveness. Nations that create original ideas shape markets. Those that only produce eventually compete on cost alone. Investing in design is therefore a strategic imperative. It strengthens intellectual property, encourages original thinking and ensures that what we create is not only made in India, but imagined in India.

Yet, capability is not built by technology alone. It depends on people who are curious, skilled and willing to keep learning. It depends on organisations that preserve knowledge, reward experimentation and improve from one generation to the next. This is why institutions matter. Invention creates possibility. Institution-building enables that possibility to endure, multiply and serve a larger purpose.

For India, this means building stronger connections between industry, academia and government. It means investing patiently in research, skills and design. And it means creating organisations that can perform not only when conditions are favourable, but when circumstances become more demanding. Institutions are rarely remembered only for what they produce. They are remembered for the confidence they inspire, the problems they solve and the trust they earn over time. I believe the same will be true of nations.

As we celebrate another year of Independence, we should take pride in the scale India has achieved. But the next chapter will demand a different mindset, one that values depth over volume, originality over imitation and enduring capability over short-term advantage. If the first phase of India’s economic story was about proving that we could compete, the next must be about demonstrating where and how we can lead. Scale has given India presence. Capability can give India leadership.

(Views expressed are personal)

Nyrika Holkar Executive Director, Godrej Enterprises Group

(This story appeared in Outlook magazine’s August 31 issue, 'Whose Idea of India?', in which India’s noted public intellectuals, policymakers, cultural practitioners, political leaders, scholars and economists write in detail about the idea of India they believe can best secure the nation’s future as we celebrate 80 years of independence.)