Bhai Bluesky - please pardon my being frank but I get confused sometimes why you always have a negative slant in your comments disapproving developments in Bangladesh and in some cases hatred and doubt toward industrial capabilities and achievements in it.
A country does not always have to MAKE any needed machines to gain development, it can import if it makes economic sense - such as sewing machines. India has to manufacture because the economics of scale for manufacturing in India makes sense. Even the sewing machines in Indian garments factories are probably sourced from overseas, local sewing machines will not have any marked advantage or won't be significantly cheaper.
If India has to setup a thousand textile mills in India then it makes sense to setup a factory to assemble or make textile looms from a basic level. Texmaco was setup for this purpose and so were dozens of other outfits during Nehru's time (license-RAJ). That is not where we are or even will be at any point.
The demand for looms and parts thereof exists locally in India (closed economy at that time), so local manufacture helped and the govt. subsidized such ventures. Same for ANY other machinery and parts and SAME in China. NOT the same in Bangladesh. We don't have a thousand textile mills, just a few good ones. We DON'T have to make looms. We can import.
Setting up a plant for making looms in Bangladesh will only make sense if we can add value to be much more competitive than China, which is not happening, even with tariff and non-tariff barriers, like they do in India. These Indian machinery makers are running to New Delhi and begging politicians to tariff imports of Chinese machines, but this can only go so far. Pointless effort in an open market and where efficient production is king.
Scale of industrial activity is much smaller in Bangladesh compared to India but value addition is much higher in some sectors such as textiles, leather and home appliances. Cellphones too. Walton ring a bell?
We don't need to follow India's footsteps, we will blaze our own trail.
Our value addition is mainly by human labor which is half as cheap as India in many sectors, such as garments, small electrics, kitchen items, light engg. etc. There is almost no mechanized value addition, mostly labor value addition. When we get into value addition by mechanization which is happening more and more in Bangladesh, industrial inputs and local machinery manufacturing will 'auto-magically' appear. And never before that.
D**k measuring our situation with India can make Indian trolls feel good about their hapless situation but that is as far as it goes.
India is a country (sorry 'loose association of ethnicities') of a Billion plus people. They will need products and goods of every sort and pricing at a humongous scale. No one is foolish enough to compare Bangladesh with India. Bangladesh can custom-build (or buy from overseas) whichever machinery it needs - depending on circumstances. It is not obligated to source any machinery locally.
Do you know we make 1000 ton cranes locally or almost all electrical heavy equipment is built locally? Because there is small or large scale demand for these items. And making locally is cheaper than sourcing overseas.
This 'Bharati' mindset from license-Raj days that 'we can build this and that, so we're superior' is hackneyed and old. The idea has subscription among certain middle class people in Bangladesh and India. There are humongous state-sponsored heavy machinery complexes in India (Ranchi? built with Czechoslovakian help in the 50's) that are rusting away now because the open market means no one will source heavy equipment from them. No money for BMRE either.
Some minister 'dost' of Nehru got paid off a handsome percentage to set this heavy engg. behemoth up and that is all they cared about. So what if it rusted away and spent hundreds of crores of taxpayer money?
Meanwhile they also spread this attractive propaganda of 'self-reliance' for certain non-essential sectors that is finding some followers even today. Deshprem tera naam dhokeybaaji....gullible lower-middle class Indians.
If machinery is not
super expensive (there is China, Taiwan, Korea even Japan) and if the technology is not
prohibited or critical then who the heck cares?? Import. And Import only what you really need and the best globally available.
You don't have information, that is all I will say. Go talk to the chambers of commerce and BIDA folks and private business-folks. I am in the know and have no doubts.
You have to worry about giving lower class folks some jobs so they don't have to pull rickshaws for a living (happening already). That is all. Rest will take care of itself.
