Awakening Vishwakarma: reinvigorating craftmanship in India
Awakening Vishwakarma: reinvigorating craftmanship in India Not long ago ‘land of Snake Charmers’ was a widely used epithet for India. By the turn of the millennia, it had a new sobriquet – land of IT engineers. By any metric of progress, this was a tremendous advance. Many economists, column writers and business leaders considered this achievement so unique, so path breaking and so mesmerizing that they came up with new developmental paradigms around this alleged Indian exceptionalism. Aided by a ‘flat earth’ [1] , India was supposed to ‘leapfrog’ into a developed economy without investing in craftsmanship and manufacturing. An average 21 st century Indian engineer would, much like the ancient snake charmer, travel the world, mastering and executing complex codified protocols using a pungi [2] made by someone else. As an unprecedented global boom followed the dot com crash, the dying public sector engineering firms and derelict factories were soon forgotten as foss...