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RAS question

What is the 'Disciplined Swadeshi' strategy proposed in the Economic Survey 2025-26?

Correct answer: (B) A three-tiered approach prioritizing strategic resilience — from self-reliance to strategic indispensability.

The Economic Survey 2025-26 proposes Disciplined Swadeshi as a calibrated three-tier strategy for strategic resilience, moving from self-reliance towards strategic indispensability in global value chains.

  1. (A)

    Complete import substitution across all sectors regardless of cost

  2. (B)

    A three-tiered approach prioritizing strategic resilience — from self-reliance to strategic indispensability

  3. (C)

    Reducing all foreign trade to zero by 2031

  4. (D)

    Nationalizing all key industries for self-sufficiency

Explanation

Disciplined Swadeshi is not a call for blanket import substitution. The cited PIB release says the Economic Survey moves towards a calibrated three-tier strategy that builds critical capabilities, reduces input costs, strengthens advanced manufacturing, and progresses from self-reliance to strategic indispensability. The tiers match the logic in the explanation: first, address critical vulnerabilities with high strategic urgency; second, build economically feasible capabilities that have strategic payoffs; third, avoid high-cost substitution where strategic urgency is low. That is why option B is right: the policy test is not whether everything can be made domestically at any cost, but whether intervention builds long-run capability and makes India a reliable, valuable part of global systems.

Why the other options are wrong

  • (A) Complete import substitution across all sectors ignores the Survey's calibrated approach and its warning that not all import substitution is feasible or desirable.
  • (C) Reducing all foreign trade to zero is the opposite of the stated progression towards strategic indispensability in global value chains.
  • (D) Nationalising all key industries is not part of the three-tier framework, which focuses on prioritised capability-building rather than ownership change.

Concept

This tests the economic-policy concept of strategic indigenisation: when the state should support domestic capability and when it should avoid inefficient protection. It recurs in RAS because current economic policy questions often ask candidates to distinguish calibrated self-reliance from crude import substitution.

Source

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