One of the major issues for manufacturing in India is the availability of reliable electricity.
I've heard this a number of times over the last decade or so, and wonder what is it that prevents factories from running their own generators/power stations. Is fuel availability also a problem? Is is not economically feasible? There are plenty of factories in the world that have backup power sources. What's happening in India that makes this not common?
Power from generators cost substantially more than power from a large baseload power plant. Factories install backup generators, but they are not the primary source of power because it is not economical to use them that way.
I'm not anywhere near an expert in this field, but I feel like I've been hearing a lot of noise about on-site power generation recently. Apple even (reportedly [1]) has their own on-site plant for Apple Park and only uses utility power as a backup; is there such a substantial difference between the power needs of a major corporate campus (with significant technical R&D onsite) and a manufacturing facility?
Depends. Generally with power there are elements of scale in favor of very large generation plants. Manufacturing does sometimes have their own power plants (aluminium needs a lot of power to refine) when you can cross that line. Also if the local utility is running into issues building large plants a medium sized plant might get under the regulations and so be cheaper. Of course when you run your own plant you also control the reliability - in some cases this can be worth a lot of extra cost. Utilities often give companies a large discount for having a backup generator that the utility can ask them to switch to at times of high demand: depending on how efficient Apple's generators are it could well be that it is cheaper to run them most days - utilities are going to be running peaking plants then anyway which are no more efficient and Apple saves the line loss price.
Generators are complex and weird. Many use more fuel at 50% of their capacity than at 80%, even though the latter is delivering substantially more power.
I didn't go into it in my original comment because I'm not an expert on the economics of on-site generation either. However, fuel availability — and materials availability in general — is definitely difficult because of India's other major problem: a lock of good ground transportation and infrastructure.
The roads are narrow and dangerous, which also means that they are unreliable and slow. For example, it can routinely take 3-4 hours to travel just 60 miles, in a passenger vehicle. The issues only get worse if you need to move a large amount of materials or goods.
Many commercial and residential complexes in India do have a backup power source, but I don't think it would be feasible to run a factory off that.
I think you are just using some extreme numbers to generalize across India. 3-4 hours to travel 60 miles you say? It takes 1 hour to drive 20 miles in Austin during office hours! So with your logic I should generalize that to the entire USA.
A lot of places do this, but taxes on fuel are high. Largely the only major thing you can do is run on diesel if you need power in the few tens of megawatt range, there is other issues that accompany this also.
I've heard this a number of times over the last decade or so, and wonder what is it that prevents factories from running their own generators/power stations. Is fuel availability also a problem? Is is not economically feasible? There are plenty of factories in the world that have backup power sources. What's happening in India that makes this not common?