Strategic Management of Industrial Clusters- Garbage in Garbage out

The last decade has seen mushrooming of cluster development implementing agencies in India. The majority of these agencies are with in government or semi government kind of environment. The massive scaling up of CDP has created a major challenge for CD methodology to produce the desired results as claimed by advocates of CD approach. Surprisingly, there is no strategic management exist to professionally manage implementation work in more than 1000 clusters involving 1000 crores of rupees.

There is need to define key performance indicators, and a right framework to convert strategic direction in to action. Currently, most of CDA/ CDMs and implementing agencies are not trained/ accredited to a critical threshold cluster methodology related actions, resulting into a complete marginalization of CD approach as such.
The major leveraging points of the approach are general not the central point of implementation.

There is visible polarization on soft and hard inputs without understanding that both are complementary to each other. The best utilization of any hard infrastructure happens in best networked and trust based clusters viz Tirupur hosiery cluster in India.

There is need to better exploit the industrial cluster concept and to review all CDPs in the light of Strategic management of these programmes with proper performance indicators and cluster experts.