Another fun day in India...

Today was an exciting day… no class. We just had two site visits in the morning and the rest of the day to ourselves. We started out by going to the Sandal Oil factory. It was the first factory we have seen that actually met my expectations of what I imagined an Indian factory to look like. It was very old and looked run down. We saw some silk trees outside the factory which was cool to see. Also, we saw piles of sap wood that are grinded up and used to make different kinds of incense. The sandal oil smells great and is used for different kinds of soaps and perfumes/colognes. I found this very interesting because to me the wood looked like it could only be used to start a fire not as a fragrance. This factory tour made me question Tom Friedman’s book The World is Flat just because of the bad conditions at the factory. How can this factory in India compare to a factory in the United States that is in much better condition? Some of the technology also seemed outdated, such as the distillation process with the old funnel (pictures attached below). If I just toured this factory in India and didn’t stop at any other sites, I would say the United States has the advantage and the global competitive playing field is not being flattened.

Following the visit to the sandal oil factory, we then stopped at the silk factory. It had saris that were priced at $1250 (50,000 rupees). The reason it was so expensive was because of the real gold used in many of them. Unfortunately, all I could take pictures of was the outside. Just as I was starting to doubt Tom Friedman’s idea on the flattening of the world, I saw this factory which had an incredible amount of automation and amazing technological uses. It reinforced my previous notions that India is definitely becoming a global competitor. In addition, a lot of the machines used in the factory were from Japan, again showing the importance of global collaboration. It was a really cool and interesting site visit.
(Picture of visit below)

After returning from the site visits, me and Nancy went to “FabCity” which is equivalent to a Target here in India. We were both commenting how similar it was to the Target in Minnesota. I am sure it was just pure coincidence, but the workers even wore red shirts. Again, this reinforced my belief that Tom Freidman is right with his argument on the world becoming flat.