Essay · Section B21 September 2026

Dependence is not the danger; not knowing where it lies is.

A wheat farmer in Punjab who buys a bag of di-ammonium phosphate this rabi season has almost certainly never thought about sulphur. He has no reason to. Yet without it there would be no bag. Rock phosphate cannot feed a plant until it is broken down with sulphuric acid, and most of the world’s sulphur is not mined at all: according to industry figures reported this week, only about a tenth is, while the rest is recovered from oil refining and gas processing. When Ukrainian drones struck Russian refineries, and when strikes hit Gulf energy infrastructure, the landed price of sulphur in India climbed to about $1,070 a tonne, from under $200 not long ago. The farmer’s harvest turned out to depend on the refinery schedules of countries he will never visit.

It is tempting to read such stories as an argument for autarky: make everything at home and fear nothing. That conclusion is wrong, and it is worth saying why at the start. No economy of any size has ever been self-sufficient in everything, and none that tried grew rich. Adam Smith put the everyday logic plainly in The Wealth of Nations: “It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family, never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy.” Dependence is simply the other face of specialisation, and specialisation is where prosperity comes from. The real danger lies elsewhere. It lies in dependence that nobody has mapped, that nobody chose, and that nobody can reverse when it is used against them.

Consider what India has learned this week about its own manufacturing. Bilateral trade with China reached $167.6 billion in 2025, but imports from China rose by about 71 per cent between 2021 and 2025, from $87.5 billion to $149.5 billion, while exports stayed broadly flat. Nearly 70 per cent of those imports are intermediate goods and another 22 per cent capital goods. India has become a major hub for assembling mobile phones, and yet the share of imported parts and components in its import basket from China rose from 3.3 per cent in 2022 to 10.1 per cent in 2025. Researchers writing in The Hindu call this the “assembly trap” of self-reliance: the more successfully we assemble, the more deeply we may depend on someone else’s components. The headline of success and the fact of dependence are the same statistic, read from two ends.

The magnet story is stranger still, because it is a story of dependence that cannot even be seen. The Annual Survey of Industries puts India’s domestic permanent-magnet market at around ₹750 crore, while trade data show imports several times that entire market. Nobody can yet say confidently where those magnets enter the economy or how they travel through it. The value chain runs from exploration and mining through separation, oxides, metals, alloys and finally finished magnets, and each stage demands different science and different industry. As the authors argue, a country may secure the mineral in the ground and still remain dependent if it cannot process it. A nation that does not know which stage it is weak at cannot choose where to invest, and a nation that cannot measure its dependence cannot manage it.

Some dependence, moreover, is not commercial at all. Documents from a global investigation reported this week show that during the 73-day Doklam standoff of 2017, the only Indian branch of a Chinese state-owned bank suspended eleven approved loans and bond investments totalling $185 million, and organised its Party members to stay in constant touch with their embassy and consulate. The sums are small by the standards of the Indian economy. The lesson is not. Capital that looks like ordinary finance on a calm day can behave like an instrument of state on a tense one. Adam Smith, the patron saint of free exchange, saw this too; defending Britain’s navigation laws, he wrote in the same book that “defence, however, is of much more importance than opulence.”

What, then, does wise dependence look like? The first requirement is visibility. Before a state can reduce a vulnerability, it must locate it, and that is a task for statistics as much as for strategy. The integrated mapping of value chains proposed for magnets, stage by stage, is not a bureaucratic luxury; it is the precondition of every other decision. The second is diversity. India’s phosphate makers have secured rock phosphate through joint ventures and tie-ups in Jordan, Senegal and Morocco. That is prudent, but this week shows its limit: diversifying one input is of little use if a second, sulphur, remains exposed to the same shocks.

The third requirement is patience, and here India has its own best example. In the 1950s Homi Bhabha conceived a three-stage nuclear programme precisely because the country had modest uranium and very large thorium resources. The plan was to use natural-uranium reactors first, then fast breeders, and finally thorium, turning a resource disadvantage into a long-term design. Seventy years on, a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission is urging that thorium-based fuel be introduced early into India’s indigenous pressurised heavy water reactors, and the eighth unit at Rawatbhata, the fourth of sixteen indigenous 700 MWe reactors, has begun loading fuel. Whatever one thinks of the pace, this is what chosen dependence looks like: importing what one must while steadily building the capability that will eventually make the import optional.

The strongest counter-argument deserves a fair hearing. Protection has a poor record in India. The licence years produced high-cost industry, scarce goods and firms that lobbied rather than innovated. Imports of sophisticated inputs and machinery can be the fastest route to upgrading, and a blanket shutter against them would punish exactly the manufacturers India is trying to grow. The authors of the assembly-trap study concede this; they argue not for bans but for calibrated tariffs on parts and components, designed to nurture chosen segments of the value chain. The distinction matters. Self-reliance as a slogan tends to become protection; self-reliance as a method becomes capability.

There is a quieter, human version of the same truth. An individual who depends on others is not weak; everyone does. The weakness lies in not knowing which dependence would break us, and having no plan for the day it is withdrawn. Nations are not so different. Interdependence has made the world richer, but it has also made it possible to turn fertiliser inputs, rare-earth magnets and bank credit into levers of pressure.

The task before India is therefore neither to depend on nobody nor to depend without thought. It is to know, precisely and in numbers, where it depends; to keep more than one door open at every critical chokepoint; and to build, patiently and over decades, the capability that turns an unavoidable dependence into a deliberate choice. The farmer buying his bag of fertiliser does not need to know about sulphur. The state that serves him cannot afford not to.