Meanwhile, traditional exports like textiles and agricultural products together account for less than 20 percent of the goods India sells to the world. India now exports fewer garments than its neighbor Bangladesh, which has one-eighth India’s population and an economy only about one-fifteenth as large.

“India has moved away from the textiles story,” said Rohini Malkani, an economist at Citigroup in India. “Now, it’s engineering goods and chemicals, including pharmaceuticals.”

In many ways, these are virtues born of necessity. The country’s poor transportation and electricity infrastructure and restrictive labor laws have discouraged companies from setting up labor-intensive manufacturing plants like those for which China is known. Instead, many Indian exporters specialize in higher-value goods and services that require fewer, but more skilled, workers.

Image Ranjit Date, president of Precision Automation and Robotics India. Credit... Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

The flowering of these industrial bases can be traced to the early 1990s. That is when a financial crisis forced Indian policy makers to slough off socialist policies known as the “licenses raj,” which tightly regulated industrial production and kept foreign competition out. The changes let businesses set up factories based on market demand and allowed foreigners to invest in India, exposing domestic companies to greater competition.

“India is beginning to get its act together in terms of the productivity of its industrial sector,” said Eswar S. Prasad, an Indian-born economics professor at Cornell University. “Fundamentally, India always had a good productive base. And given the low base which we were starting from, it’s not surprising that India is doing so well.”

But still not as well as it could be. Some economists predict the Indian economy will grow by 7.5 percent this year, to $1.6 trillion. Such growth might thrill many countries, but it would be down from 8.5 percent last year. And it is below the 10 percent growth rate that many economists say India could achieve if it invested more in infrastructure and if the government further relaxed its tight grip on many parts of the economy.