Post by Pritam Banerjee

Very happy to present the fifth paper in our Industrial Supply Chain Series. For reports no. 4 and 5, we had the privilege of working with Centre for Domestic Economy Policy Research (C-DEP). My thanks to C-DEP colleagues led by Jaijit Bhattacharya for this excellent partnership. This report brings focus on bottle-grade PET resin which is a critical intermediate powering India’s USD 1.5 billion downstream packaging ecosystem. The report brings out a critical nuance going beyond just import dependence. The fundamental question is related to ensuring domestic capability in key upstream products such as PET resin that have horizontal cross-industry uses and application. Events in the recent past have shown that import dependence on such key items can compromise the industrial eco-system. The trade-off between cheap imports and the transition to adequate domestic supply at competitive rates and with the right specifications needed by user industry are the some of the fundamental policy questions we want to raise through our industrial supply chain series. We look forward to your feedback. My compliments to the authors! Jaijit Bhattacharya Manmeet Singh Gulati Qayoom Khachoo Kashika Arora PhD Anilesh Mahajan Arpita Mukherjee Sunil Barthwal Centre for WTO Studies Dr. Rajan Sudesh Ratna Pratim Bose Dr. Amit Randev Murali Kallummal Zaki Hussain, PhD Sachin Kumar Sharma