PM Modi’s $24 billion manufacturing push is stuck on the assembly line

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Its collapse will expose a major fault line in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaign for greater economic self-reliance. Already, influential critics are asking if the much-touted success in becoming a hub for smartphone manufacturing is a hollow claim. Low-end assembly-line jobs, created with the help of expensive state subsidies and protectionist import duties, would only make sense if they were a quick pathway to more sophisticated production, such as of microprocessors. To that end, a likely rejection by the government of incentives for the 28-nanometer chip unit proposed by Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal’s Vedanta Resources Ltd. and Taiwan’s Hon Hai...