We have a wealth of resources, we choose to buy from others.

"A second round of hikes in import duties was announced recently, this time on telecom equipment,"  wrote AA Rastogi. "This is a move to not only curb imports but also rein in a rising current account deficit (CAD), aiming to check the rupee's weakness against the dollar." However, "The hike in customs duties is seen as too little to trigger any reasonable correction in CAD." India is facing a higher current account deficit, because of higher oil prices and a falling rupee, and a higher fiscal deficit, because of off-budget promises of higher prices for farm produce, wrote A Ranade. Whereas the fiscal deficit is in rupees, which makes it easier to repay, the current account deficit is in dollars, which increases costs as the rupee falls against the dollar. An analysis showed that "India has among the highest effective average rates of tariffs across major trading economies of the world," wrote N Kwatra. "Among members of the BRICS grouping -- Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa -- India has the highest effective tariff rates on food items, automobiles and industrial inputs." Not only do tariffs make things more expensive for Indians to buy, they invite retaliation from trading partners. Worse, these increases in tariffs are hardly going to decrease our CAD because we import almost everything, wrote Jethmalani and Pengonda. We could take advantage of the trade war between the US and China by increasing our coal and agricultural exports to China, wrote Joshi and Tandon. Trouble is, that the government restricts exports of agricultural products to lower prices of food within the country. High food prices are deadly for elections. As for coal, "despite having the fifth largest coal reserves in the world, India is likely to import 164 million tonnes in the current calendar year as production inefficiencies and transport bottlenecks force companies to look overseas". The same is true of the oil and gas sector. Despite having huge untapped reserves the terms for exploration are so onerous that private companies are not interested, wrote Nichols and Tongia. With the government looking to switch the nation to electric vehicles our wealth will remain underground and we would have paid trillions of dollars buying oil from countries like Saudi Arabia. A former union minister once said that the oil import lobby threatened ministers with violence if there was any attempt to reduce imports. He later retracted his statement. We have signed Free Trade Agreements which encourage imports of iron, copper, aluminium and zinc, while our resources go unused. If we want to be poor who can stop us.