What India sells, and what it buys.

Each panel is one HS heading, the four-digit level of the international customs code, which has not changed meaning since 2017. Scales differ: crude runs to billions of dollars a month, rice to hundreds of millions. Read the shape and the number in the corner, not the height against the next panel.

Values are dollars at the time of each shipment. A taller crude line can mean more barrels or dearer barrels; the plate on prices and volumes below separates the two.

The space between the two lines is the trade deficit. It is not a loss in the way a household's overspending is: India pays for it with what it earns from services, the money its workers abroad send home, and foreign investment. When the gap narrows sharply, it is usually because imports fell, not because exports boomed.

Exporters rush to ship before the financial year closes, so March is usually the peak and April falls back. Compare a month with the same month a year earlier, not with the month before. The deep trough in April 2020 is the national lockdown.

Each bar is one year's deficit, cut into three. India buys crude and petroleum products and also sells refined products abroad, so the petroleum bar is what it bought minus what it sold. Gold is almost all imported, for jewellery, savings and weddings, and only a little goes back out as gold itself; jewellery exports are counted in the third part. The totals come from the Ministry's commodity tables, so they differ slightly from the RBI's yearly figures in the long view above.

When oil is dear the blue part grows without India buying a barrel more. When gold is dear, Indians often buy fewer tonnes but pay more dollars.

Below zero is a deficit. The oil line falls when crude is expensive (2008, 2012 to 2014, 2022) and recovers when it is cheap (2016, 2020). In this series gold sits inside non-oil, so the grey line carries both gold and India's growing appetite for electronics, machinery and chemicals.

The groups are the Ministry's own: they follow how industries are organised (engineering, chemicals, textiles) rather than the customs chapters. Each bar is the latest full year; the circle is the same group fifteen years earlier, in dollars of each year, so some of the growth is inflation.

Read it beside the export plate. Electronics appears on both: India imports components and finished goods while exporting assembled phones, so a rise in electronics exports usually comes with a rise in electronics imports.

A chapter is the customs code's broadest shelf: chapter 27 is all mineral fuels, crude and products alike; chapter 85 is electrical machinery, from phones to transformers; chapter 71 is pearls, stones, jewellery and gold. The every-cut table at the end of this guide opens each chapter into its headings and tariff lines.

Imports are more concentrated than exports: a handful of chapters (fuels, electronics, gold and stones, machinery) make up most of the bill, which is why oil and gold prices move India's deficit so much.

A deficit with one country is not a problem in itself: India buys crude from the Gulf and Russia because it produces far too little of its own (see the crude oil plate below), and pays for it partly with what it sells to the United States and Europe. Countries are where goods come from or go to as declared at customs, so goods routed through the UAE or Singapore count against those hubs.

This is a separate ministry table from the monthly partner tables above, so it reaches back to 2009-10. The two agree where they overlap but are drawn apart.

Read the two lists against each other. Where a chapter appears on both, India is often buying parts, machines and chemicals from China to make goods it then sells abroad: electrical machinery bought as components can leave as finished phones. A chapter is a broad shelf, so the same number can hide very different goods; the every-cut table at the end goes down to the heading.

Asia here includes the Gulf states, among India's largest sources of crude oil (they sit near the top of the deficit list above), as well as China, South-East Asia and South Asia. America here is North and Latin America together.

A unit value index tracks the average price per unit of the goods traded; a quantum index tracks how much was traded. When an export headline says "record", ask which one moved. The net terms of trade divide export prices by import prices: above 100 means a unit of exports buys more imports than it did in 2012-13.

The indices cover only goods that are counted in units, so they move less tidily than the dollar totals. The export volume index in particular jumps from year to year in ways the value of exports does not; read it as rough.

Tonnes do not change with the price of oil, so this is the plate to read when the dollar bill for crude jumps. India's own oil fields have produced less each year for over a decade while refining has grown, so every extra litre of fuel the country uses is, in effect, imported.

The gap between the two lines is, roughly, how much the rupee lost against the dollar that year. A headline that reports exports in rupees will usually look better than one in dollars; neither is wrong, but only the dollar figure tells you whether India sold more to the world.