Uday Kotak said India need to become self reliant given its border tension with China on one side and Pakistan on the other (Photo Credit: The Economic Times)
Kotak Mahindra Bank CEO Uday Kotak said that given India’s geostrategic challenges, there is no alternative to being Aatmanirbhar.
On February 24, the Russian President ordered a military operation in Ukraine. Since then, heavy fighting has been on between the two countries.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, on Sunday (February 27), announced a veiled nuclear threat saying he has ordered to put the nuclear deterrent forces in a “special regime of combat duty”. Hectic parleys are on to de-escalate the tension in the region.
Amid this, the CEO of Kotak Mahindra Bank, Uday Kotak, said there is no alternative to be Aatmanirbhar. In a post on Twitter, he said, “Ukraine-Russia conflict highlights that geography matters. For India, with China on one side and Pakistan on the other, both nuclear enabled, our dependence on Russian military equipment, and US far away, we have challenges. One thing this war teaches for sure: be Atmanirbhar!”
Since Narendra Modi took oath as the prime minister in May 2014, he has been consistently explaining why India needs to be Aatmanirbhar. His government took multiple initiatives to reduce the country’s dependence on imports and develop things within the country.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, “When India speaks of becoming self-reliant, it doesn’t advocate a self-centred system. In India’s self-reliance; there is a concern for the whole world’s happiness, cooperation and peace.”
In December 2019, the world came under the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Prime Minister has announced an Rs. 20 lakh crore economic package under the ‘AatmaNirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan’ to aid our country out of the Coronavirus crisis (making us self-reliant).
After the push to be Aatmanirbhar, the Union government provided monetary and other help to multiple institutions to develop and manufacture the Covid-19 vaccine. The country launched the world’s largest vaccination drive against Covid-19 in January last year. More than 177 crore doses of the Covid-19 vaccine have been administered till now.
The country was an importer of PPE kits when the pandemic struck. Now, the country not only manufactures PPE kits for its consumption but also exports them.
In December last year, the Union government banned the import of 351 sub-systems and components under its scheme to promote the manufacturing of defence equipment and systems in the country. It was the third such list in the last 16 months.
“A positive indigenisation list of sub-systems/assemblies/sub-assemblies/components has been notified by the department of defence production, Ministry of Defence, as part of the efforts to achieve self-reliance in defence manufacturing and minimise imports by defence public sector undertakings,” the Defence Ministry had said in a statement.
In the current crisis, the Union government has launched a massive evacuation drive for its citizens stranded in Ukraine. Multiple chartered flights have been pressed in action to bring back the stranded nationals. To further boost the evacuation mission, the Union government Monday (February 28) announced that four Union Ministers, Hardeep Singh Puri, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Kiren Rijiju and General (Retired) VK Singh would visit the “neighbouring countries of Ukraine to coordinate the evacuation mission”.
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