Is possible to ban all Chinese products in India

Instead of boycotting the Chinese products, we Indians should focus on how can we make products which will compete with the Chinese products and then slowly reduce their dominance. India imported goods worth around $74 billion from China and exported around $18 billion to China in 2019. There you can see how huge imbalance is there and this imbalance is called trade deficit which is certainly not good for any country. Every country aims to reduce the trade deficit as much as possible so that you are not dependent on the other country.

I’ll be sharing some data which clearly shows it’s not possible to boycott China:

1. The market share of Chinese brands in the Indian smartphone market reached a record 66% during Q1 2019. Xiaomi remained the smartphone market leader in Q1 2019 with a 29% share.
2. In the Automobile sector, 27% of imports for the auto industry come from China.
3. In laptop market share, HP- 28%, Lenovo-28%, Dell-26%, these are the percent shares of companies in India where Lenovo is a Chinese company and Dell is mostly manufactured in China.
4. In the Pharma sector, India imports around 66% of API(Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient) from China which is used for producing medicines.
5. The most commonly used fertilizers which are used in the agriculture sector like Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium all are imported from China.
6. Cosmetics like Maybelline, Revlon, Calvin Klein Beauty, and many more are manufactured in China.

This clearly shows China’s dominance in India and banning Chinese products is not an option.

Now, I'll talk about some real ways in which we can actually boycott Chinese products. The first thing that will come in our minds is to use made in India products, it’s pleasant to hear and we should encourage that but imagine $70 billion worth products coming from China, it’s very unlikely that we will fill the market on such a short notice with Indian products and also large scale manufacturing doesn't happen in India. So, what can we do?

The only realistic solution is to gradually replace Chinese imports with other countries. For that, we have to analyze what are the products being imported from China, and according to WTO(World Trade Organisation) India imports around 52% of Mechanical and Electrical equipment which includes washing machines, mobile phones, engines, TV, etc from China. Now, in order to replace them, we have to look around other countries which export such products, and the countries making such types of products are Japan, South Korea, Germany, and many other European countries.

India can import products from these countries and use their products as replacement and side by side start setting up manufacturing plants. Evidently, India should focus on increasing trade with these countries and consequently replacing trade with China.

I hope this is informative.

For detailed analysis check this out: