The Economic Survey on Manufacturing: What It Gets Right and What It Avoids

The Economic Survey 2025–26 marks a noticeable shift in how the government views manufacturing. Gone is the confident assumption that manufacturing growth will follow naturally once incentives are announced and procedures are simplified. This year, it appears to be a more layered claim. The survey reckons that India’s industrial future will hinge on whether it can embed itself in global value chains (GVCs) as a credible, high-quality and technologically dependable producer. This is a welcome shift in diagnosis. Perhaps it is also an implicit admission that earlier manufacturing strategies, which were heavy on incentives and light on institutional depth, ran…