By Ravindra Rao
Piyush Goyal’s challenge to Indian industry to map every imported good that can be made at home is not a policy nudge. It is a civilizational reckoning. The question is whether India’s boardrooms are ready to answer it.
There is a particular kind of absurdity that defines India’s economic story in 2026. A country of 1.4 billion people heirs to centuries of craft, engineering, and enterprise still imports furniture from abroad despite having some of the world’s finest carpenters. It imports capital goods, auto components, and medical devices even as its cities ring with the noise of construction and ambition. Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal, speaking at the Bharatiya Vyapar Mahotsav, put the challenge plainly: identify every good being imported into India that can instead be manufactured here, and build it. It sounds simple. It is anything but. And that is precisely why this directive matters more than most policy announcements of recent years. India’s import dependency is not a new problem. It is a stubborn, structural one. For decades, it was easier and often cheaper for Indian businesses to source from abroad than to invest in domestic production capacity.
Global supply chains were reliable, geopolitical weather was fair, and the macroeconomic logic of comparative advantage appeared to sanction the arrangement. That era is conclusively over. The world has changed with a speed that has left many assumptions in ruins. Pandemic-era disruptions exposed the brittleness of just-in-time supply chains. Geopolitical tensions from the Taiwan Strait to the Red Sea have made import routes fragile. The United States and the European Union are aggressively subsidizing domestic manufacturing through landmark industrial policy legislation.
China has fortified its own supply chains while remaining, paradoxically, both India’s largest import source and its most consequential strategic competitor. Against this backdrop, an India that continues to passively import is an India that is volunteering for strategic vulnerability. Goyal’s call to industry clusters in Rajkot, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Batala, and Pune is therefore not mere economic nationalism. It is a response to a transformed geopolitical reality. When a CT scan machine can be manufactured in Visakhapatnam, as the Minister cited, the question is no longer whether India can make things. The question is whether it will organize the will, capital, and policy environment to do so at scale.
The Ministry’s framework identified for import substitution and global competitiveness gives the initiative structure. Furniture, electronics, industrial machinery, auto components, leather and footwear, food processing, medical devices: these are not abstract categories. They represent millions of jobs, hundreds of thousands of MSMEs, and entire industrial ecosystems waiting to be energized. In each of these, India has raw material, skilled labor, and often latent technological capability. What has been missing is coordinated intent. Goyal’s fresh directive to startups and MSMEs to actively map import substitution opportunities takes that intent further. By asking industry itself rather than bureaucrats alone to identify the gaps, the government is wisely recognising that the intelligence needed for this exercise lives on factory floors and in entrepreneurial minds, not in ministry files. This co-creation of industrial policy is, if sustained, a genuinely important shift in approach. Yet the history of such initiatives demands realism alongside optimism. Import substitution has a complicated legacy globally.
In the 1970s, it served as a shield for inefficiency and rent-seeking in many developing economies. India itself lived that experience. The difference today must lie in the insistence on global competitiveness not protection for its own sake, but production that can stand on international markets. Goyal’s articulation of this distinction is critical: India should not just meet domestic demand but become, in his words, a ‘global factory of the world.’ That is import substitution with export ambition a far more demanding, and far more promising, proposition. What will make or break this mission is execution at the level of policy detail. Industry needs more than encouragement it needs a clear regulatory pathway, faster approvals, competitive power tariffs, logistics infrastructure that does not erode margins before goods reach port, and access to technology and capital. The Production Linked Incentive scheme has shown what targeted support can achieve in electronics and pharmaceuticals. Similar architecture, calibrated to the specific conditions of each of the twenty sectors, must now follow. The Minister’s suggestion that the Commerce Ministry present import substitution opportunities in a more systematic, data-driven manner is equally important.
A publicly accessible, regularly updated dashboard of India’s import dependencies sector by sector, product by product would be a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and investors looking for their next bet. Sunlight, as always, is the best catalyst. India is set to record nearly $863 billion in exports this financial year a historic high. The foundations are being laid. But every billion dollars of avoidable imports is a billion-dollar opportunity that India has handed to someone else. Goyal is right to press the question. It is time Indian industry answered it not in boardroom presentations, but in steel, in circuits, in craft, and in commerce. The era of importing what we can make at home must end. Not by diktat. But by ambition, organization, and the quiet pride of a nation that finally decides it will no longer pay others to do what it can do for itself.
The author is Chief Strategy & Execution Officer at a leading NBFC.
Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.