Sixty-five years of making things.

The blue line is manufacturing alone; the grey line is the wider industry sector, which adds mining, utilities and construction. The gap between them is everything industrial that is not a factory. Manufacturing peaked at – in 1995, in the first flush of the 1991 liberalisation, and has spent three decades sliding back.

The pandemic did not dent the annual share: it rose in calendar 2020, because services fell faster than factories. The lowest point of the whole series is recent: – in 2024.

The same sixty-five years as Plate 1, in volume instead of share. Indian factories added – of output in 1960 and – in 2025: a – multiplication. The share can fall while the level rises, because GDP grew even faster. Both charts are true; they answer different questions.

"Constant 2015 US$" means every year's volume is priced at the 2015 exchange rate. It is a measuring convention, not a market valuation: the rupee's 2015 rate is simply the ruler the World Bank laid down.

One point per calendar year, growth over the year before. The line has crossed below zero only four times on this vintage, in 1979, 1991, 2019 and 2022; the deepest fall on record is –. The peak was – in 2006, the height of the 2000s boom.

The pandemic does not appear as one clean crash. Annual calendar data smears the lockdown quarters (March–June 2020, in India's fiscal Q1) across neighbouring years, so 2019–2023 reads as a whipsaw: –. No single annual point is "the lockdown".

Five lines that always sum to 100: one group's gain is arithmetically another's loss. The story is the long swap at the edges: textiles & clothing fell from – of factory value added in 1963 to – in 2023, while machinery & transport rose from – to –. Chemicals climbed to a 1998 peak of – and has eased since.

These are shares of value added, not of output tonnage and not of jobs. A group can shrink here while employing more people than ever: value per worker is exactly what differs across the five.

Of every hundred dollars of goods India sells abroad, how many are manufactures: chemicals, machinery, textiles, gems and jewellery worked, not raw. The share rose from – in 1962 to a peak of – in 1999, then gave some back as petroleum products and commodities swelled the denominator.

A falling share here does not mean falling factory exports: the numerator can grow while petroleum grows faster. And services, the sector where India is genuinely world-class, are outside this ledger entirely.

UNIDO sorts manufacturing into technology tiers; this line is the share of value added made by the top two: machinery, electronics, vehicles, chemicals and their kin. It opened the 1990s at –, spiked to – in 1995, sank to a trough of – in 2007, and has crept back since.

The series ends in 2022. UNIDO's technology decomposition arrives years late, and the WDI serves it as-is. For 2023, 2024 and 2025: we do not know. The plateau is the finding: three decades, and the share is within two points of where it began.