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access to the Indian market for German investors and licensers.14 Also, in
other areas of economic cooperation, Scientific and technical coopera
tion, development cooperation and in trade relations, certain new priori
ties were set or activities intensified. The following discussion is con
fined to the above-mentioned areas of cooperation. Furthermore, the
content of discussion is meant to mainly centre round some particularly
relevant aspects of economic cooperation in individual areas.
Industrial Cooperation:
The industrial sector manifests, as has already been illustrated,
some notorious weak spots. Apart from some modern subsectors,
such as nuclear technology and aviation industry, the majority of
branches of industry betray relatively low level, at least in terms of
their international competitiveness. Many industrial companies are
timeworn. Added to this is the inadequate infrastructure both in the
communication sector and in the power sector. Finally, a mention
must be made of barriers imposed by industrial policy, i.e. the
protection of Indian industrial enterprises through severely restrictive
conditions for industrial cooperation with foreign companies, which
to a certain extent continue to be operational. This scenario has greatly
impinged upon industrial cooperation with German enterprises as
well.
Industrial cooperation between India and Germany has neve
rtheless a long tradition. As early as 1950 there were impressive
examples of industrial cooperation: prominent among them being
joint ventures between Daimler Benz and TELCO as well as the
enterprise of Robert Bosch GmbH in Bangalore known as MICO.
Besides FRG's small and medium-sized industrial houses were able
to initiate joint ventures with Indian counterparts. Yet, for along time,
India as a destination country for German direct investments failed to
rank among the favoured nations of the Third World: in 1982 its share
was only 1.7% whereas the direct investments in Brazil were 28 times
larger than in India.
But in terms of investments of German industrial enterprises
alone, the picture has changed over the past three decades. India takes
the fifth position following four Latin American countries. Since the
beginning of the 1980s there has been a special reason for improving
the climate for investment in India: The bottlenecks in the way
of cooperation, e.g. laws, ordinances and administrative procedures,
were attenuated a great deal. Today, there is an increasing demand for
