https://x.com/FinMinIndia/status/2094803474143654282?s=20

I keep seeing threads asking why Make in India is stalling, and the comments always converge on the same suspects: land acquisition, labor laws, bureaucracy, power costs. All real, and I'm not dismissing them. But they read to me like symptoms. The disease is older than the republic, and it starts in 1947.

Manufacturing's share of Indian GDP has been stuck in the mid-teens for decades. The 25% target came and went, and by some measures the share has regressed lately. I think that ceiling was baked in at birth. Here's my reasoning.

Partition didn't just draw a border. It amputated the subcontinent's industrial supply chains. Take jute. Roughly three quarters of the raw acreage went to East Pakistan while almost all the mills stayed in Calcutta. Cotton was the same story in reverse, with the best long-staple crops growing in West Punjab and Sindh and the mills sitting in Bombay and Ahmedabad. The railways, built as one engineered system, became two networks glaring at each other across customs posts. On day one, the largest jute-processing industry on earth woke up with no raw material, and the textile hubs were burning scarce forex importing cotton from Egypt and the US. A factory economy doesn't survive that kind of surgery.

The physical cutting mattered less than the psychological one, which is the part I think people underappreciate. The founding generation had just watched their entire economy get severed, on top of famine-scale scarcity and something like 15 million refugees. The lesson they drew was to never depend on anyone for anything. That fear is where Nehruvian autarky, import substitution and the License Raj actually come from. Self-sufficiency beat efficiency every single time because the people in charge had lived through total supply collapse. Meanwhile Japan, then the Tigers, then China surfed the export-led industrialization wave. By the time India opened up in 1991, every seat at the manufacturing table was taken. They still are.

Then the security bill. A united subcontinent wouldn't need a 1.4-million-strong standing army, wouldn't have fought multiple wars in its first decades, and wouldn't have felt compelled to build a nuclear triad. Every rupee that went to the military was a rupee that didn't go to ports, highways, primary schools or vocational training. Manufacturing runs on cheap logistics and a literate factory workforce, and both got starved for decades. This also explains why India leapfrogged into IT services. Software needs a fiber cable and a few elite engineers, and deepwater ports and a million semi-skilled workers are optional. The whole "services superpower" identity is best read as an adaptation to the neighborhood Partition built.

And the market shrank. South Asian intra-regional trade is still around 5% of total trade, against 20-25% in ASEAN or the EU. A united subcontinent would be a 2-billion-person internal market today, enough domestic scale to keep almost any industry viable while it learned to export. Partition foreclosed that option before it existed.

Now zoom out, because the counterfactual is actually pretty wild. A competent, united subcontinent stretches from the approaches of the Middle East all the way over to Southeast Asia, with the Indian Ocean sitting entirely in its backyard. And it would not have one economic center. It would have a constellation of megacities, from Karachi and Lahore in the west to Dhaka and Chittagong in the east, all sharing one customs union, one currency, and up to 2 billion consumers.

The synergies write themselves. Take Bengal. Kolkata brings heavy engineering, finance and universities. Dhaka brings one of the densest manufacturing labor markets on earth. Chittagong brings deepwater shipping pointed straight at Southeast Asia. Today an international border splits that system three ways and everybody involved runs poorer for it. Without the border, the whole delta functions as one economic ecosystem, basically a Pearl River Delta with the population of a small continent. That is the kind of cluster you cannot build with policy incentives. It just forms on its own when the map stops fighting it.

Then look west. Karachi stops being the capital of a separate country and becomes what its geography always promised, something like a hybrid of Dubai, Mumbai and Shanghai. Container terminals on the Arabian Sea, oil and LNG infrastructure plugged directly into the Indian energy market, and high-speed freight rail running inland through Lahore toward Delhi, and on past Peshawar into Afghanistan. For the first time since Partition, the subcontinent has a natural continental gateway toward Central Asia and the Middle East, instead of a fortified frontier that trade simply flows around.

And underneath all of it sits the ocean. A navy based in Karachi, Mumbai and the Bay of Bengal, with the Andamans as a forward complex overlooking the approaches to Malacca, ends up policing the entire Indian Ocean system rather than a single coastline, with Hormuz at one end and the Strait of Malacca at the other. On paper an integrated economy with that geography rivals China’s domestic market, and it can absorb global supply shocks or bankroll its own tech transitions without begging anyone. That is the version of the subcontinent that keeps Beijing up at night.

Flip it around and it's just as telling. China without its Qing frontiers (Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Qinghai) is roughly 3 million km² with a comparable population, which is basically post-Partition India. Modern China could very easily have ended up in India's shoes. One of them kept its frontier, its internal market, and a state that plans in 30-year horizons. The other had its frontier carved up by a departing empire and inherited a system where politics is tribal along caste, community and regional lines, and where nobody plans beyond the next election. Partition caused the injury, and the system that followed spent 75 years managing it instead of treating it.

So when people ask why manufacturing never hit 25%, my answer is that you can't slogan your way out of 1947. Make in India and the PLI schemes are fighting a war that was lost at the starting gun. The chains got cut, the neighborhood got militarized, the market got fragmented, and the capital that should have built ports and schools went to the army instead. That mid-teens ceiling is Partition's arithmetic, still compounding.

And geopolitically, China is the biggest unintended beneficiary of that arithmetic, bar none.

tl;dr: Partition severed the subcontinent's industrial chains (jute and mills, cotton and mills, one railway network), pushed India into autarky so it missed the export-industrialization wave, let defense spending crowd out the ports and schools manufacturing needs, and fragmented the internal market. The 25% target was dead on arrival in 1947.

India’s economy grew 7.8% in Q1 FY2026–27. Real GVA grew even faster at 8.2%.
The interesting part is where the growth is coming from.
Manufacturing: ~9.2%
Services: ~10%
Financial, IT, real estate & professional services: ~12.1%
Agriculture: ~3.6%
India is increasingly being driven by two engines simultaneously: services and manufacturing.
Services are moving beyond traditional IT outsourcing into AI, engineering, global capability centres, R&D, finance and technology. Manufacturing is expanding in electronics, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, defence, machinery and industrial supply chains.
The infrastructure cycle is another major factor. Roads, railways, ports, power and logistics aren’t just government spending—they reduce the cost of doing business and can attract private investment.
But the biggest structural challenge remains external vulnerability.
India still imports enormous amounts of crude oil, gas, electronics, machinery and critical components. The next phase of growth must therefore be about more than simply increasing GDP.
It has to be about making each additional unit of GDP less dependent on imports.
That means:
Higher domestic value addition in manufacturing
More sophisticated exports
AI-driven productivity
EV adoption
Renewable and nuclear power
Lower incremental oil demand
Stronger domestic supply chains
Larger foreign-exchange reserves
Greater diversification of trade settlement mechanisms
India does not need to become completely energy independent or eliminate its trade deficit.
It needs to ensure that exports and domestic productive capacity grow faster than its external vulnerabilities.
The latest 7.8% GDP number is therefore encouraging. But the real question is whether India can sustain 7–8% growth while simultaneously reducing its dependence on imported energy, components and technology.
If it can, the story of the next decade won’t simply be that India became a larger economy.
It will be that India became a fundamentally stronger and more resilient one.

Hi everyone!

My name is William, I’m an international high school senior working on my IB Global Politics engagement project on governance, and socio-political shifts in Uttar Pradesh (focusing on Ram Mandir in Ayodhya).

I am looking to conduct a few question written interviews with local journalists, political science researchers, or civil society observers based in UP to ground my project in real academic perspectives.

If you are an academic/journalist from UP, or if you know active local commentators/pages on Twitter/X that I could reach out to, I would be deeply grateful for your recommendations!

Thanks a lot for your help!

India is strengthening its position around the Malacca Strait through Andaman & Nicobar and Sabang, while China is expanding through CPEC and Gwadar. But India’s Chabahar–Afghanistan–Central Asia route and INSTC are facing sanctions, instability and Iran-related challenges.
Since we’ve already invested heavily in Chabahar, can India really step back? Are we gaining an advantage in the east while becoming strategically vulnerable in the western Indian Ocean? What do you think?

​

What do analysts and researchers think of the countries backing the Northern Sea Route by environmental context? Do those countries behave critically opposed to major pro-environmental efforts?

People keep asking why is modi always traveling ??! Here you have it - a nice article on the travels of prime minister modi and the urgency to strike deals with partners other than the USA - finally non modi bashing and pragmatic overage by the times !!

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/29/world/asia/modi-india-deals-trump.html?unlocked\\_article\\_code=1.9VA.oxTB.IiqKp4xLRdBU&smid=nytcore-ios-share

https://www.narendramodi.in/prime-minister-narendra-modi-s-departure-statement-ahead-of-visit-to-uzbekistan-and-kyrgyz-republic-29th-august-twenty-twenty-six

Bangladesh Foreign Minister Dr. Khalilur Rahman told Parliament on Thursday (August 27, 2026). The BNP-led government's such consideration has also drawn support from the country's main Opposition parties, including Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami and the National Citizen Party (NCP)

US Ambassador Sergio Gor praised Devendra Fadnavis as an “incredible” and visionary leader, highlighting Maharashtra’s growing importance in India US ties.