If you are Indian, your entire life is imported!

 

Imports have taken over your life. You may not have realised, this but almost everything you do is NOT made in India.

 

Take the morning routine of reading the newspaper. The paper it is printed on is probably imported. According to the Indian newsprint manufacturers association, in 2015 India imported 1.39 million tonnes - just about 55 % of total consumption, mainly from Malaysia and Canada. 

 

So your raddiwala has globalization to thank for his job.  

 

 

And when you add that spoon or two of sugar to your tea, from 2011 to 2014, India imported $600 million worth of sweetness. This despite unpaid bills of about half that amount to Indian sugarcane farmers. How is that for a policy paradox?

 

By the time you have lunch, imports are back with a vengeance, even if you have a simple everyday non-gourmet meal. And nothing is simpler than dal-roti. Last year India imported five million tons of pulses - the humble dal for God’s sake.  An estimated 25 % of India’s lentil consumption is imported.  

 

 

This year, till June, India has already imported five million tons of pulses. And is looking at double that by December 2016.

 

 And of course, those lovely dishes of deep-fried fish or samosas - well all of them naturally would be impossible to make without cooking oil. India imports cooking oil by the supertanker!  A staggering 12 million tonnes of the stuff came into India in 2015. 

 

 

The Indian farmer incidentally can grow very little without organic manure, which again is brought in from abroad  - about 60% of it.  Last year India spent just under a billion dollars on it.

 

And do not even think of using the internet on the mobile or computers without imports.  For, at the heart of every cell phone that processes your selfie or updates your WhatsApp messaging is a computer chip. 

 

A full  80% of the world’s computer chips are made in just five countries –USA, Japan, China, South Korea, France and Britain. 

 

 

Vietnam, with a new Intel plant, is the latest entrant. Without the microchip,  there would be no SMS, no workstation – nothing!  

 

Commuting without imports, as we all know, is impossible. India imports 75% of its oil and 100% of its aircraft, so you can’t take any flight at all without imports. Aircraft constitute about 13 percent of all Indian imports in terms of value.

 

Lastly, just before you set out for that wedding reception wearing all that gold  - remember that India imported an unbelievable 1000 tons of gold last year.

 

Now all this would be ok if it was a matter of comparative advantage. We should import what we cannot produce and export those things that we are good at producing.  

 

This is not the case edible oil. And lentils can be grown easily in India. But India has a skewed policy that gives wheat and rice farmers a better guaranteed price and thus takes away the incentive to grow other things. 

 

Gold is seen by the millions of people who are not exposed to the banking credit system as an easy liquid way of credit in bad times. Hopefully, the 'Make in India' scheme and the Jan-Dhan policy will reduce some of the everyday import items over the next decade. But it will be a tough long haul.  

 

The total import bill last year was $360 billion. This makes India very vulnerable to currency shock. So we better pray hard that the rupee keeps its value in 2016-2017.

 

Ninad D Sheth is a senior Delhi-based journalist. The views expressed in this article are his own