For all these reasons, the auto industry offers a special opportunity for Indian manufacturing, and one shared with other advanced manufacturing industries such as defense, steel, aircraft, and shipbuilding. Defense and shipbuilding have been the targets of recent policy reforms—similarly geared toward spurring growth in large industries that can have powerful knock-on employment effects. And for aircraft, not India’s traditional strength, change may come soon: Lockheed Martin has just proposed to relocate its entire F-16 production line to India, and is now signed up with the Tata group as its partner. (Whether the Indian government selects this aircraft is of course another matter.)

Car manufacturers have bet on the expansion of India’s domestic market. Ford estimated in 2015 that India's compact-car segment, which has accounted for around 45 percent of the passenger-vehicle market, would grow from 1.1 million in 2014 to 1.6 million in 2018.This figure still looks small compared to the size of India’s population, because passenger vehicles do not yet dominate Indian roads. But it also indicates India’s vast room for further growth as its middle class expands and seeks to transport families more safely by moving up to a car from a scooter or motorcycle. In 2016, Americans bought more than 17.5 million passenger vehicles (meaning cars and SUVs); the Chinese bought a little over 28 million.

Of course, not everybody believes that India will be able to replicate the manufacturing success of its East Asian peers. Even assuming that further (and long-overdue) reforms advance expeditiously, India’s manufacturing prospects will intersect with global technological and economic trends. Changes have been unfolding worldwide that raise questions about whether a focus on manufacturing can bring prosperity. Around the world, the rise of automation has raised quality standards and productivity, but at the cost of jobs. The rise of 3-D printing has only just begun, and could affect supply-chain considerations to an as-yet-unknown extent. These two trends alone are just in their infancy.

For the developing world in particular, there are concerns about the prospect of “premature deindustrialization,” to cite the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik’s work. The term describes a downturn in the share of manufacturing in developing countries well before their economies match those of wealthier nations. Rodrik attributes this in part to the effects of trade and globalization—competition from China and other major manufacturers on the global market—which suggests that India (and sub-Saharan Africa for that matter) would have a hard time patterning its growth on China’s labor-intensive strategy.

These developments, while potentially destabilizing, are no reason for Indian officials to stop trying to promote manufacturing. Morgan Stanley’s Ruchir Sharma, reflecting on the implications of technological change, notes in his Rise and Fall of Nations that the robotics revolution “is likely to be gradual enough to complement rather than destroy the human workforce.” He ventures that “new jobs we can’t yet imagine” will help fill the gap. Development institutions like the World Bank, along with management consultancies like McKinsey, continue to see opportunity for India to do more to reform laws and policies that inhibit manufacturing’s growth, whether for the domestic market or for export. In 2016, a World Bank report recommended policy changes to help the countries of South Asia, with India a notable focus, benefit from rising wages in China that result in the relocation of apparel sourcing and the potential for job growth. The same year, McKinsey Global Institute issued a set of recommendations that included “Manufacturing for India, in India” in its top five “opportunities for growth and transformation.”