Where Bajpeyee speaks from the plant floor, Dr. Narendra Jha, Founder & CEO, Evatoz Solutions Pvt. Ltd. approaches resilience from the data layer that increasingly runs beneath it. As founder of a connected vehicle and asset tracking company, his lens is less about physical infrastructure and more about the intelligence that makes it work.
India must own the intelligence layer itself.
From Storage To Live Networks
Jha argues that Indian warehousing has long been built around centralised hub and spoke logic, with large nodes clustered near ports and metros. A more distributed manufacturing base, spreading into Tier II and Tier III clusters, breaks that logic entirely. Drawing on patterns, his company observes across logistics partners, he insists the real bottleneck is not storage capacity but visibility. Warehouses, in his view, need to function less like static buildings and more like nodes in a live data network, where inventory location, vehicle dwell time and dispatch reliability are tracked continuously rather than reconciled once a month.
What Pharma Got Right
Asked how another sector might replicate pharma’s backward integration success, Jha answers from his own domain of connected hardware, noting that most Indian telematics and IoT companies, his own included, still depend on imported GPS modules, cellular chipsets and sensors. Pharma’s high domestic value addition did not happen by chance, he explains. It happened because policy created durable demand certainty, giving manufacturers the confidence to invest capital. Hardware needs the same treatment, he argues, through component level incentives and genuine domestic semiconductor and sensor fabrication rather than superficial import substitution. Backward integration, in his words, follows confidence in demand rather than the reverse.
The Gap Between Automation And Intelligence
On Industry 4.0, Jha sees India as closer on the shop floor than in the data layer. Many manufacturers have automated individual machines, which he calls the easy and visible part. Genuine Industry 4.0 requires those machines, vehicles and warehouses to feed a single decision layer capable of predicting failure and rerouting logistics before risk becomes cost. In fleet and mobility specifically, he still sees fragmented telemetry, with separate systems for tracking, maintenance and compliance and little unifying intelligence connecting them.
The Decision That Will Define A Decade
Looking further ahead, Jha frames the defining choice for India as whether it builds its intelligence layer domestically or continues importing it while manufacturing hardware locally. In a decade, he argues, value across every supply chain, automotive, pharma and electronics alike, will sit less in the physical asset and more in the software that predicts and optimises it. Mastering manufacturing while outsourcing intelligence, he warns, would mean building the body without owning the brain.
