It was on May 12 that our PM announced to public the slogan “Vocal for local”. Soon it went viral on social media and people misread(or rather misunderstood as ban of foreign products).
What it meant was support for local products to make our country indigenous. That is what “Athma Nirbhar” meant meaning self reliant. But people misunderstood it to something like ban foreign products. Why is this not a good way to analyse? Because a sudden ban on foreign products is almost impossible.
We are using many things that are foregin products. For example take Maggi its not made in India. Most of us like it very much. Now a sudden ban on that product means there should be a well known brand and people should like it immediately no matter what it tastes like forcing customers to switch habits. This sometimes works but many times it fails because switching is hard and if there is no proper replacement the replaced product that was made in India will incur a huge loss eventually leading to its closure. This change will be gradual and cannot be reflected immediately like switching off or on a fan switch.
There is another side effect of banning foreign product. If we ban foreign products even foreign countries will ban our products. That is a huge loss to our economy. We don’t want that to happen. So dear social media users don’t spread false meanings extracted from such news like some Media does it.
Government today already announced that going local does not mean we are getting isolated from the world. It means we are being more self reliant so that in a situation like now we are in will help our economy to not fall completely apart.