Bloomberg’s Colonial Hangover Strikes Again: Why Do Indian Columnists Keep Belittling India’s Progress?
India’s transformation into a major global manufacturing destination is one of the most consequential economic developments of recent years. A country once overwhelmingly dependent on imported mobile phones is now a leading producer of smartphones, an important exporter of electronics and a growing destination for multinational supply chains. Approximately one in four iPhones is now manufactured in India. Factories, industrial parks, transport networks and an expanding workforce have helped turn what was once an ambitious policy objective into measurable industrial activity. The journey remains unfinished, but it represents a remarkable change in India’s economic position, especially for a nation still confronting enormous development and employment challenges.
Yet sections of the international media seem incapable of discussing India’s progress without immediately explaining why it should be considered inadequate. The latest example comes from Bloomberg Opinion columnist Andy Mukherjee, whose commentary questions whether Apple’s growing manufacturing presence will make India another China. Imported components, government subsidies and limited domestic value addition become the centre of the argument, while the scale of India’s industrial transformation is pushed into the background. Bloomberg’s promotion of the column reinforces the impression that an extraordinary achievement must first be accompanied by a warning against celebrating it. Why must India build China’s entire industrial ecosystem before its own manufacturing success is recognised?
Union Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw responded with figures intended to challenge Bloomberg’s portrayal. He said the government had paid approximately ₹19,000 crore in Production Linked Incentive benefits, while citing ₹25,000 crore in direct tax collections and ₹3 lakh crore in GST collections. He also referred to 25 lakh people employed in electronics manufacturing, including 12 lakh in mobile manufacturing. These are the minister’s cited sectoral figures, not a complete calculation of the scheme’s net fiscal return, but they draw attention to economic activity that cannot simply be dismissed as the product of subsidies. More importantly, this confrontation comes just days after Bharat Pulse News questioned Bloomberg’s negative framing of India’s expressway development. Two different sectors, two major national achievements and a familiar editorial instinct: find the deficiency and make it the story.
Bloomberg’s Familiar Formula: Find the Achievement, Then Belittle It
There is a recognisable pattern in the two controversies. India builds modern expressways, and the discussion focuses on truck operators reluctant to use them because of tolls and the practical advantages of older routes. India becomes a major manufacturing centre for iPhones, and the discussion turns to imported parts and incentives. These concerns are legitimate subjects for economic journalism. But their legitimacy does not settle the question of editorial framing. A report can contain accurate details while leaving readers with an unbalanced impression of the underlying development. Which facts lead the story, which achievements become incidental and which comparisons are treated as decisive are editorial choices, not inevitable conclusions.
New infrastructure will face adoption challenges. New industries will begin with imported components and gradually build supplier networks. Established manufacturing powers themselves went through long periods of dependence, experimentation and state support. If every transitional weakness is presented as an indictment of the broader achievement, development becomes an impossible examination in which the passing mark keeps moving. The problem is not criticism of India. It is the apparent urge to qualify Indian progress before readers have even had an opportunity to appreciate its scale. Bloomberg should be asked whether its treatment is consistently proportionate, or whether scepticism has become a default setting whenever the subject is India’s development.
Who Decided India Must Become the Next China?
Mukherjee’s comparison contains a particularly revealing assumption. China spent decades developing a dense manufacturing ecosystem supported by infrastructure, supplier relationships, skilled labour, export policies, investment and substantial state intervention. India, by contrast, is still building many of those capabilities. It began by attracting assembly operations, expanded domestic output, became an important exporter of finished phones and is now trying to deepen component manufacturing. That is how industrial ecosystems grow. The absence of complete localisation today is not proof that the development strategy has failed; it is one of the challenges the strategy is designed to overcome.
Official Indian figures show mobile phone production rising from roughly ₹18,000 crore in 2014-15 to ₹5.45 lakh crore in 2024-25. Exports increased from about ₹1,500 crore to ₹2 lakh crore over the same period. Those changes are not imaginary, and they cannot be erased by pointing out that some of the components inside a smartphone still come from overseas. India does not need to replicate China’s economic history, political system or every part of its supply chain to become a competitive alternative for global manufacturers. Indeed, diversification works precisely because countries offer different combinations of skills, costs, markets and capabilities. Why should India be told that one of its biggest industrial advances remains insufficient until it resembles the very country from which global businesses are trying to diversify?
Western Subsidies Are Strategy, Indian Subsidies Are Suspect
Bloomberg’s emphasis on incentives also deserves closer examination. The United States has committed tens of billions of dollars to semiconductor-related programmes under the CHIPS and Science Act. Europe has pursued its own semiconductor strategy, with the European Chips Act intended to mobilise substantial public and private investment. Governments across developed economies openly support industries they consider essential for strategic security, employment and technological independence. Public incentives are discussed as instruments of national economic strategy because policymakers recognise that industrial capacity cannot always be left to market forces alone.
When India uses a Production Linked Incentive programme to attract manufacturing, however, the discussion too readily becomes one of costly subsidies and questionable returns. Of course the programme should be judged on its merits. Every rupee of public expenditure requires accountability, and the minister’s figures should not be confused with evidence that every tax receipt or job was created solely by the PLI scheme. But that is an argument for rigorous evaluation, not for treating industrial support as intrinsically suspect when India employs it. The proper comparison is with what other countries spend, what capabilities they acquire and whether the resulting production becomes sustainable. If industrial subsidies are prudent policy in Washington or Brussels, India deserves to have its investments assessed by the same economic standards.
The Gora-Approval Syndrome and the Colonial Mindset
Behind this framing lies an uncomfortable intellectual question. Colonial rule did more than control territory and resources; it fostered a hierarchy in which judgments from Western institutions were treated as inherently more authoritative than those emerging from India. Political independence ended colonial administration, but an instinct to seek intellectual validation abroad has not entirely disappeared. Within sections of the English-speaking commentariat, a harsh appraisal of Indian achievements published by a prestigious Western outlet can still be mistaken for a mark of sophistication. The more dismissive the assessment, the more courage and independence are sometimes attributed to its author.
This is the gora-approval syndrome that deserves serious scrutiny. An Indian columnist does not become more objective by consistently viewing Indian development through expectations established by mature foreign economies. Nor does an international publication acquire immunity from accusations of prejudice simply because the criticism carries an Indian byline. The issue is not the ethnicity of a writer or the nationality of an editor. It is the intellectual posture of treating India as a perpetual underachiever even when the evidence records substantial progress. Indian commentators working for Western publications should be particularly well equipped to explain the country’s developmental constraints. When they instead adopt comparisons that make its advances appear permanently inadequate, they invite questions about whose worldview they are serving.
Indian Byline, Western Narrative: Who Sets the Agenda?
Bloomberg is not merely a neutral platform upon which individual writers deposit their opinions. Its editors decide what to commission, publish, highlight and promote. Headlines, framing and the relative prominence of facts shape the meaning received by audiences far beyond India. The responsibility for this editorial culture therefore cannot be assigned exclusively to the columnist whose name appears beneath an article. Bloomberg must stand behind the standards it applies when portraying the development of an economy whose progress matters to investors, manufacturers and policymakers across the world.
Consider the proximity of the two episodes. One account of Indian expressways highlights the reluctance of some freight operators to adopt new infrastructure. Another commentary on iPhone manufacturing emphasises the shortcomings of a rapidly expanding industrial ecosystem. Neither story is objectionable merely because it identifies problems. Their similarities, however, justify asking whether India’s achievements are repeatedly being presented through a template of disappointment. An Indian journalist employed by a Western institution should not be a convenient vehicle through which such assumptions escape examination. A familiar name and a prestigious masthead do not turn editorial framing into an objective verdict on India’s economic future.
Vaishnaw’s Numbers and the Reality of Industrial Transformation
Vaishnaw’s response matters because it forces attention back towards output, exports, employment and the broader economic effects of manufacturing. The numbers he cited require clear attribution and careful interpretation, particularly the distinction between the contributions of an entire industry and the additional benefits produced by one incentive scheme. But the scale of India’s industrial expansion is independently visible. Electronics production and exports have grown sharply, global manufacturers are expanding their presence, and India has moved from dependence on imported finished phones to large-scale domestic production. Dismissing this transformation because localisation remains incomplete would confuse the next stage of industrial development with the absence of development itself.
India’s policy is also evolving. The government has introduced additional measures intended to promote domestic sourcing of components, greater value addition and more sophisticated manufacturing capabilities. These initiatives should be examined critically for effectiveness, but they directly address the very weaknesses highlighted in the Bloomberg commentary. The pertinent questions are whether India is building better suppliers, attracting long-term investment, developing technical skills and becoming more competitive over time. A fair assessment must examine the direction of change rather than use the current gap with China as a permanent verdict. India’s manufacturers are not claiming the journey is finished. They are demonstrating that the journey has advanced substantially.
Criticism Is Journalism; Habitual Negativity Is a Choice
No serious commentator should demand that Bloomberg celebrate every government initiative or overlook the drawbacks of industrial policy. Imported components, subsidy efficiency, environmental costs, toll structures, manufacturing competitiveness and the quality of employment all deserve investigation. India needs journalism prepared to ask difficult questions. But asking difficult questions does not require reducing every achievement to a catalogue of deficiencies. Editorial credibility comes from proportion, consistency and context, not from an automatic preference for the most pessimistic interpretation available.
A useful test is whether the same standards are applied when other major economies spend public money to develop strategic industries, confront manufacturing setbacks or struggle to persuade businesses to use new infrastructure. Would an American or European breakthrough be framed primarily around everything the country had not yet accomplished? Would early difficulties be treated as proof of a failed ambition, or as problems that accompany the construction of something larger? These are fair questions for Bloomberg because its influence imposes a responsibility to examine not just governments but also its own editorial assumptions. Prestigious journalism must be able to withstand scrutiny of the standards by which it judges others.
India Does Not Require Bloomberg’s Permission to Succeed
The wider concern is not that Bloomberg has published two critical pieces. It is that these pieces reveal a style of argument in which India’s progress appears perpetually conditional. Build the highways, but first explain why some vehicles avoid them. Manufacture the iPhones, but first explain why imported components prevent a full claim to success. Offer industrial incentives, but first defend a policy tool that wealthy economies already use. Under such a framework, India is always asked to prove that its achievements deserve recognition while the comparison shifts towards some older, richer or more industrially mature economy. That is precisely the intellectual hierarchy India should have outgrown.
India’s factories, roads and supply chains exist to serve its people and national interests, not to earn applause from Western newsrooms. Its government remains answerable for the effectiveness of public expenditure, and its companies must compete in demanding global markets. But accountability should not be confused with perpetual condescension. Bloomberg and the Indian columnists whose arguments it chooses to amplify are entitled to criticise India, just as Indians are entitled to challenge the apparent double standards and colonial-minded framing of that criticism. The answer to one-sided commentary is not silence but a more rigorous examination of who sets the benchmarks, which facts are emphasised and why an emerging power’s successes are so often treated as disappointments.
India will continue to face industrial bottlenecks and developmental obstacles. It will also continue producing, exporting, building and competing. The existence of the former does not cancel the significance of the latter. India is no longer waiting for the West’s permission to develop. Perhaps it is time Bloomberg and its Indian columnists stopped behaving as though that permission is still theirs to grant.
