Can India Industrialize?

The bigger issue is unevenness in the creation of manufacturing clusters. For example, most of those packaged medicines in the export graph are primarily manufactured in the Chandigarh/Himachal/Haryana/Punjab cluster and the Telangana/Maharasthra cluster.

Northern (Delhi/Haryana/Punjab/Himachal/Uttrakhand/Jammu Kashmir), Western (Gujarat, Maharasthra, Goa), and Southern (Telangana/Kerala/Karnataka/Tamil Nadu/Andhra Pradesh - though Andhra is a laggard as well) India are extremely industrialized and have HDIs and incomes comparable to mid-tier states in Mexico and China. The issue is deindustrialization in central India (UP/Bihar/Madhya/Jharkhand/Chhatisgarh) and Eastern India (West Bengal/Assam) due to lack of skilled labor, governance issues, and high costs.

India is a federal country and the onus of creating a regulatory and legislative environment conducive for businesses falls onto local government (cities, panchayats, district collectors) and state government (CMs, state legislatures, state civil service). Otherwise, "Make In India" will continue to chug along but only to continue to enrich and further develop the half of India that's already well governed, while leaving central and eastern India chronically underdeveloped. Also, the pandemic definetly did not help and set back development severely.

> Why has “Make in India” failed? It’s possible that the Indian regulatory environment and business culture just weren’t suited to this kind of big push for manufacturing, and that it would have succeeded in China or Vietnam.

Answer:- Corruption and Babus (babus refers to bureaucrats whose only job is to 'harm' citizens)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33368104

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24106545

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33368942

This very thoughtful analysis clearly shows how naive is the idea that uncontrolled almost unregulated free market will automatically solve everything in the best way possible.

Looking at these charts really brings into focus how unusual and spectacular China's progress has been. China's gdp per person cuts upwards across several of the other countries like its line was on a different scale or something. Same thing with the poverty one, in the opposite direction.

The author says "the experience of China — the only country comparable to India in size — is very encouraging here. ... if that feat could be repeated in India, it would be absolutely incredible." But, I think that there is a certain amount of unrealistic idealism in that statement; after all, it wasn't the natural laws of unregulated capitalism or some natural result of the progression of time that brought that kind of progress, it was engineered and created. Ironically, nobody understands how capitalism works better than communists do.

Of course, material advancement is not a justification for oppression. China had to sell out its own working class, at least in the short term, and silence all dissent to get those kinds of results. And it does other bad things too, which I don't need to mention, because we all know.

My point is, I wouldn't expect India to follow China's path, at least, not as quickly. They don't have the chinese communist party to engineer it.