Jay Bardhan

Exports — a consultant. Trade in agro, machine, chem shipment. Sharing Indian industrial ascent through advanced trading and global exports.

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

Honestly, my favorite activity is visiting manufacturing plants across India and meeting some amazing founders.

And this is just the perfect timing for manufacturing automation in India!

I was reading the PwC–Observer Research Foundation report, which estimates that AI will help India’s manufacturing MSMEs create $135–150 billion in value by 2035.

But only if we move MSMEs from their current 35.4% share of manufacturing GVA to 50%.

That's the gap we need to close right now...

India has 7.5+ crore MSMEs employing around 35 crore people, which makes the sector one of the largest economic engines in India.

Remember, if manufacturing reaches 25% of India’s GDP and MSMEs increase their share of manufacturing value to 50%, the sector is projected to unlock $3.88 trillion in growth by 2047.

Right now, India's MSMEs have a 74% productivity gap with large firms.

Just walk into most small plants, and you'll see how manual quality checks, unplanned downtime, and energy waste you can literally feel. BUT...

Here is the good news is that our manufacturing expanded 8.1% in December 2025, the highest in over two years.

Right now, we need an estimated $500 billion in AI infrastructure investment by 2035, no matter what, and there is a massive $100B+ demand opportunity for MSMEs to supply the physical backbone, like cooling equipment, standardized piping, and industrial chambers, to new data centers and semiconductor plants.

The future of Indian manufacturing is just super exciting...

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

@brahma_4u I bought two of them for 280, and they're completely useless.

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

@PritnRandom @NaxatraLabs Who is handling your design and UI/UX? The work is absolutely amazing.

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

@prakdadlani The BIB community will be an absolute resource for Indian manufacturers and exporters, Prakash ji. Love the logo.

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

@PritnRandom In particular, manufacturing machinery made in India.

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

India just achieved $50B in electronics exports.

Vietnam, a country 1/14th our size, crossed $150B this year.

China does $1T in electronics exports.

You may be thinking that India's growth is extremely impressive till you realize we're playing catch-up mode in a multi-trillion-dollar competition.

Definitely, we went from practically zero to around $50B in a decade. That's 8x growth.

Electronics is now India's third-largest export category, and we're the world's second-largest smartphone manufacturer. We built this from 2 mobile manufacturing units in 2014 to 300+ today.

What surprises me is that just like the IT boom of the 90s, only 2 or 3 states are doing the heavy lifting; the same as the entire country, apart from tiny pockets like Kanchipuram (TN), Bangalore (KA), and the NCR, is practically nowhere in the electronics exports.

Tamil Nadu by itself does around $15B, and Karnataka adds $8B, that's nearly 60% of our total exports coming from just two states.

The majority of India is barely in the game.

It's the IT story all over again. Bangalore, Pune, and Hyderabad built that industry, and everyone else watched.

We're too slow. Too concentrated.

Too relaxed, accepting that 2-3 states do the heavy lifting responsibilities, and the rest of India rests on the sidelines.

Indian states like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana need to move. NOW. Definitely, not that we're planning a huge industrial park, but actual production.

Land, power, logistics, skilled workers. Fast.

China didn't become a $1T electronics exporter by accident.

Vietnam didn't hit $150B by being cautious.

Read their story, you'll be shocked to know how they became a global giant.
Let me tell you about my contribution, I'm actively sourcing made-in-India automatic textile machines and spare electronics parts from Ludhiana, Punjab, for Bangladesh, my personal non-negotiable is ONLY made-in-India products.

NO outsourced components.

NO imported add-ons.

Just pure domestic manufacturing.

[Sandeep Mall @SandeepMall]

The timeline makes you so hopeless about India.

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

Japan banned Indian mango imports for the first time in 19 years.

Japanese quarantine inspectors visited a Vapour Heat Treatment (VHT) facility in Uttar Pradesh, and they flagged deficiencies in fumigation and pest control (specifically regarding fruit flies).

In consequence, Japan refused to accept any mango shipments carrying Indian inspection certificates issued after March 25th.

Literally, super annoying and humiliating.

This feels exactly like déjà vu for regular exporters.

Did you know that Japan previously banned Indian mangoes in 1986 over similar fruit fly concerns?

It took roughly 20 years and the launch of strict, non-chemical VHT plants starting in Tirupati to regain access in 2006.

Two decades later, we are back at a standstill.

In the past year, India exported around 32,000 metric tonnes of mangoes around the world (worth $60 million), primarily facilitated by the UAE and the US. Japan contributed just $1.54 million of that export.

Still, Japan is a high-value prestige market for us, and losing access to it is a massive reputational disadvantage for Indian agricultural trade on the global stage.

In fact, our exporters are currently facing a severe spike in airfreight costs due to geopolitical tensions in West Asia; for example, freight rates to the US have risen from roughly ₹250/kg last year to nearly ₹630/kg today.

So, the situation for us is already under high pressure.

The exact situation is a clear reminder of how fragile global agricultural trade can be.

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

@Paravkahol 🤣

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

@_anil About 90-92% of our trade has normalized since the February election. However, we are currently experiencing some payment delays due to their dollar crisis, which is expected after that kind of blunder.

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

Alright, last-day shipments are done before Eid. Cleared the last trucks by the evening.

Everyone's tired, in the good way, the kind that comes from actually finishing something. Now I've got a whole week ahead. A stack of reports and research papers I haven't been able to touch for two weeks because the task at hand was just relentless.

In fact, trade volume always spikes before every major holiday on the Bangladesh and Myanmar side (in Mundra as well, I've noticed); it's expected, but it never gets easy to manage.

What most people don't know about South Asia's busiest land port is that you're not just shipping goods. You're actually in charge of two time zones of trust/assurance, the exporter on one side, the customs broker on the other, and the forwarding agent standing in the middle, trying to keep both happy as the trucks stand in line in the 50-degree heat.

Well, I'm going to start with the RBI Trade Data Quarterly first. Then the BBIN corridor feasibility update. Maybe finally get through that McKinsey manufacturing export report I saved in February.

Being quiet after a rush of energy has its own kind of productivity.

Looking forward to it.

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

@nirajxdev Same, my priority is on strengthening India's exports, similar to the successful approach the people of China took approx 30 to 40 years ago, rather than becoming part of the same rat race.

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

We often think of manufacturing as basic assembly lines, low-cost labor, etc., etc., but if you check, this particular McKinsey report (the future of manufacturing) points out a very demanding truth, that the future belongs to highly agile, interconnected enterprises that depend primarily just as much on conventional information, research, and service providers as they do on heavy machinery. The era of blindly searching for the lowest labor cost is now over, and today, it's about being close to inventory and cutting-edge innovation, and what particularly popped out to me most was how India's expansion routine is beginning to closely align with the US.

The US is focused on building technologically advanced, scalable supply chains and bringing critical production closer to home, and India is aggressively scaling manufacturing capacity to serve as the world's most viable alternative industrial hub, and both of us realize that controlling production is no longer a business; it is a vital aspect of our economic survival. The combination of US tech and India's booming production base is going to influence the cycle of global trade for the next five decades.

Well, today is the last day of the holiday. It’s time to go back to the port, back to the shipments.

[Prakash Dadlani @prakdadlani]

Client: "What's your price?"

Me: ₹100

Client: "Make it ₹65 and send PI."

Bhai Sahab:

If my margins were that high, I’d be chilling in the Maldives sipping coconut water right now.

Not arguing with you on our 3rd negotiation call of the week.

Negotiate hard.

That’s part of business.

But keep it realistic.

With love (and rapidly disappearing patience),

B2B Factories of Bharat ❤️

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

@10_X_eng Let's go

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

@jcrajan00 No matter how well we handle the physical prep work, we always face a delay in shipping bills, bills of entry being generated, and to worsen the frustration, logistics and couriers consistently struggle to coordinate timely pre-shipment pickups... the chain is endless...

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

@ArmaanDhanda1 @Forbes Keep growing.

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

@Curious_Com_ 🤣

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

The USA and Singapore beat India's exports ($80 billion) in April 2026.

But... where are Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan?

These are literally our closest neighbors.

Land-connected. No ocean freight. No complicated customs problems at ports.

The easiest, lowest-cost trade routes you could imagine.

Bangladesh: $8 billion in exports (FY26 till Nov), our 7th largest export destination.

Nepal: $7 billion, and our exports make up 15% of their whole GDP.

Bhutan: $2 billion, accounting for 80% of their total trade.

This combined to roughly $15-16 billion.

That's less than what we export to the USA in just 3 months.

Do you even know what's going on here? We're literally spending enormous amounts of resources shipping goods approximately halfway around the world when our next-door neighbors are ordering from China.

Nepal's imports from India totaled $3.26 billion in just five months.

Bangladesh imported $9.6 billion from India.

Bhutan is at $1.01 billion.

It actually looks good, but it's not. In fact, their future potential is significantly more prominent than this statistic.

When major transshipment hubs and Western powers make the front-page business headlines, our closest neighborhood is an absolutely golden opportunity, and we are not even looking at it.

The actual opportunities I'm trying to attract young exporters to are the following:

1. Absolutely zero ocean logistics costs, a regular truck carrying it across the border, and no LCL/FLC container shipping problems.

2. You understand the market, and language barriers are barely noticeable.

3. India has upgraded our border checkposts to international standards significantly, and, for example, just look at the ICP Petrapole.

4. Nepal's trade expanded 20% in the first five months of FY 2025–26. It's huge.

5. Lowest competition, and most exporters are targeting the USA and EU, bypassing what's next door.

Remember that the USA, EU, Singapore, etc., will always be critical markets.

Start where shipping costs are lowest, and the market availability is most convenient.

Build friendships in markets you can physically visit in a few hours.

Scale regionally before going across the sea.

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

@KiranKS The Make in India initiative has undoubtedly paid off.

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

Bengal traditionally had exceptional logistical and geopolitical advantages as a global port hub before decades of governmental slowdown weakened that edge, so with ₹1,000 crore, I’d double down on bringing back our central industrial DNA by upgrading a number of hardcore manufacturing, heavy-duty engineering projects, and export pipelines, specifically across machines (garments), metals, chemicals, and, of course, semiconductors.

The vision is to redevelop Kolkata's industrialized infrastructure and upgrade it into a highly profitable manufacturing mega-hub designed based on the scale and efficiency of Shanghai.

[The Bengal Inc @TheBengalInc]

The biggest mistake founders make is assuming opportunity only exists where everyone else is already building.

You have ₹1,000 crore.

You have Kolkata.

What are you building?

#Kolkata #TheBengalInc #IndianStartups

[Jay Bardhan @jaybardhan]

Alright, last-day shipments are done before Eid. Cleared the last trucks by the evening.

Everyone's tired, in the good way, the kind that comes from actually finishing something. Now I've got a whole week ahead. A stack of reports and research papers I haven't been able to touch for two weeks because the task at hand was just relentless.

In fact, trade volume always spikes before every major holiday on the Bangladesh and Myanmar side (in Mundra as well, I've noticed); it's expected, but it never gets easy to manage.

What most people don't know about South Asia's busiest land port is that you're not just shipping goods. You're actually in charge of two time zones of trust/assurance, the exporter on one side, the customs broker on the other, and the forwarding agent standing in the middle, trying to keep both happy as the trucks stand in line in the 50-degree heat.

Well, I'm going to start with the RBI Trade Data Quarterly first. Then the BBIN corridor feasibility update. Maybe finally get through that McKinsey manufacturing export report I saved in February.

Being quiet after a rush of energy has its own kind of productivity.

Looking forward to it.