India has embarked on the path of self-reliance with no clear road map. This paper highlights the need to demystify the concept and argues that any path to self-reliance would require creating new productive capabilities that would be determined not by what the country can produce but what it can export. Following the “product-space” perspective, promoted by Ricardo Hausmann and others at the Growth Lab of Harvard University stating that a country’s capacity to add new capabilities depends strongly on the existing ones, I assess India’s export performance since 1988 along three dimensions: growth, diversification, and upgrading, with the objective to understand how well India is prepared to achieve the goal in this globalised world and recommend developing a well-informed export strategy.
