Opportunity to uplift families out of poverty in Bihar will come with industrialisation and building factories that employ local talent. Skilling for the jobs can be done. Lets push for more small scale industries too.
@samrat4bjp ,
@_ShreyasiSingh ,
@mishranitish
There's a frame in Made in India: Titan Story that lasts barely a few seconds. The series keeps its focus on JRD, Xerxes Desai and his team, whose faces we have decided to remember.
But the real story of Titan may belong to the men in that forgotten frame.
First, IAS officer Mahadevan. And then K. Rajaram, Minister for Industries in MGR's Tamil Nadu govt, head of TIDCO. And by the show's own telling - a man who did not trust capitalists. Here was a politician of conviction, suspicious of private capital on principle. And yet, when the Tatas came with a proposal... he said yes.
Why?
Because the deal carried a condition he could not refuse... Hire local. Employ the people of the soil. And so a watch factory rose in Hosur on the backs of a workforce that was barely 10th pass. The Minister set his ideology aside... Not out of weakness, but out of a higher loyalty. To jobs... To livelihoods... To the quiet transformation of ordinary lives.
And transform it did.
Hosur was a border town with an industrial estate and not much else. Titan turned it into an ecosystem. Suppliers. Training centres. Ancillary units. Worker housing. An entire economy spun out of a single anchor. A town became a cluster.... an industrial powerhouse.
In 1984, TIDCO staked ₹10 crore on Titan. 40 years on, that bet is worth nearly ₹1 lakh crore - close to 1/3rd of Tamil Nadu's projected revenue receipts of ₹3,44,575 crore for 2026-27... Imagine that.
I think about that scene very often... because it echoes something older and closer to home. People of my parents' generation in Bihar tell me they watched the 1982 Asian Games on TV sets built by a Bihar govt PSU. The same PSU once made video equipments too. There was a time when a state could believe in industry... Build it.
And perhaps that is the real lesson buried in that single forgotten frame: a state's destiny is not decided by what it owns, but by what it has the courage to believe in - and the patience to let that belief grow.