The Scale-Out Gap: India’s Missing Industrial Layer
Over the past decade, India has become significantly better at building industrial capability. Production-linked incentives, logistics corridors, cluster-based development, and targeted skilling programmes have begun to produce credible manufacturing and technology ecosystems. In sectors ranging from electronics to renewable energy, the state has shown that it can assemble land, infrastructure, policy support, and demand visibility into functioning industrial nodes. But a structural gap remains. These successes tend to stay localised. They do not reliably replicate across geographies. India does not lack industrial policy. It lacks a scale-out system. Early Signals of Scale—But Not Yet Systemic There are early signals that India is beginning to move beyond isolated capability creation into scaling. India's smartphone manufacturing ecosystem has vastly expanded over the last few years. More recently, the broader electronics manufacturing ecosystem has also expanded. In parallel, gre...