I kept swinging between agreeing and disagreeing with the article, almost rhythmically. I do agree that Indian policy making is largely at fault for not understanding the inputs to intermediates to product pipeline. But, recent efforts (rare instances) in some manufacturing areas do alleviate the China dependency problem and it's not the case that India is uniquely to blame for China's overcapacity nor is it uniquely vulnerable to it. That said, the risks posed are real and I'm am not trying to rebut the article, but some thoughts on how to go about solving India's China/import dependency follow. How has India's policy making been a problem: 1. Inverted duty structures (higher import duty on inputs while having lower duties on finished products). 2. Poor understanding of the supply chain (have the ore for a mineral, but can't refine it, so can't produce input materials that directly go into producing finished goods) 3. Poorer understanding of who in India buys what from whom - unable to compute what Indian capacity to protect and what imports to tariff. This means effective tariffs end up hurting Indian manufacturers, especially MSMEs. 4. Really terrible understanding of trade offs: for example, higher steel duties may protect Indian steel plants but reduce export competitiveness for engineering goods because the input cost itself is high. I know there's no easy answer to this conundrum. All that said, I propose a double blind data driven policy exercise that the Indian govt should conduct to get to grips with the scale of the problem. Here's what they should do: 1. Get people who map supply and value chains and are blind to any regulatory or trade policy. For example, build product graphs at the input level, intermediate level and the output level for millions of products India can make. 2. Find gaps in the supply chains (again blind to policy). Simply nail down what we have and what we need at each level. 3. Diagnose why each gap exists. Is it a raw materials issue, an energy issue, a capital cost issue, a logistics issue, a technology access and knowhow issue, a regulatory time and cost or an import duty issue. 4. Now bring in experts who are blind to the import or regulatory constraints to purely rank which of those gaps can be closed simply based on local capacity or enhancing local capacity. 5. Finally, policy wonks must be forced to derive the diagnosis and the therapy based on the results of this exercise. This can then be curated into a cohesive, bundled policy that isn't purely reactive. Meaning the govt is no longer setting trade and industrial policy simply based on immediate geopolitical factors or protecting local manufacturing when faced with headwinds or randomly issuing mining licenses because rare earth supply may stop tomorrow. This process can have a constant feedback loop that drives dynamic policy making. It can be reactive while ensuring a long term, stable policy in terms of what India wants to manufacture. Without an understanding of what we are missing in the supply and value chain, we will never become a manufacturing power.