Page 388 - Week 02 - Thursday, 8 March 2007
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Our companies and institutions need to understand what is taking shape in India. India will be a major driver of world trade and technology in the coming years and we must integrate our companies into the emerging global supply chains that India is creating, shaping and driving. But there are current and real business opportunities as well. We have a growing Indian presence in our education export sector. Our ICT sector has the capacity to tap into niche parts of the Indian market now, as well as developing partnership arrangements with some of the larger companies. Our defence technology and biotechnology capabilities are the equal of any in the larger states and of relevance to what is happening in the life sciences industries in India. We also have a unique capacity in screen-based design and technologies.
In the first few days of the mission, India’s national daily newspaper carried a front page article on Australia and how it had just displaced the United Kingdom in the destination of choice ranking for overseas study. With just under 30,000 Indian students now studying in Australia, we sit in second place behind the United States, with about 60,000 Indian students. Some analysts have predicted that the number of Indian students studying in Australia will reach 40,000 within another 12 months.
Canberra is currently home to about 300 Indian students. The potential to grow the market is obvious. The number of ICT and engineering graduates each year in India is simply staggering, somewhere in the order of 500,000 per year, and not bad when you consider that Indian universities are only capable of taking the top one per cent of students.
But what its tertiary system does not do particularly well is to produce work ready graduates or talent that is capable of accelerated development in western business environments. The idiomatic English skill of graduates is recorded as a problem. The training is rigid and not conducive to the freewheeling and innovative thinking that US and Australian graduates are renowned for, and there has been little emphasis on the development of soft managerial skills. We here in Canberra are well placed to support Indian institutions and organisations with all these things.
Tourism is also a significant opportunity. In the 10 years from 1992 to 2002, Indian visitor numbers to Australia grew from 10,000 per annum to around 45,000. According to the Australian Tourist Commission, the next 10 years will see numbers reach 147,000 per year by 2012. A significant driver of both the education and tourism markets is certainly the Bollywood film. Both Melbourne and Sydney have had recent blockbusters filmed around their iconic locations, and it is something that I believe we should also seriously pursue.
While in India I visited Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and New Delhi. The first day of the mission was to see some of those Bollywood companies first up. I met with Adlab Films Ltd and Yash Raj Films, two of the largest entertainment conglomerates in India. One of the outcomes of these meetings will be consideration of facilitation and support of an Indian film being shot in the Australian Capital Territory. There is also interest from a southern Indian film production company that has been generated through one of the mission participants, Butterfly Media.
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