Has India deindustrialised prematurely, after three decades of free market reforms? Probably not. The manufacturing sector’s share in gross domestic product has stagnated, and Kuznetsian structural transformation has stalled. The dispersion and rankings of the major states’ manufacturing employment and output shares have broadly remained unchanged. In the top and bottom 50 districts, the share of manufacturing employment in total employment has remained constant since 1991. Yet, the district-level spatial concentration of employment by industry has increased, and the coefficient of localisation is rising. Thus, the industrial change discernible at the micro level seems too feeble to show up in the aggregate.
