We have lot of practice at import substitution.

"Late last month, Uber Eats, a subsidiary of ride-sharing major Uber, decided it had had enough of a market in which it was losing millions of dollars," wrote Sundeep Khanna. It sold out to Zomato even though "the online food delivery market in India is burgeoning, growing at 16% annually and likely to reach $17 billion by 2023 according to a study by business consultancy firm Market Research Future". Uber's decision could have been prompted by the problems facing Vodafone, with the government demanding "more than Rs 53,000 crore (Rs 530 billion), including over Rs 28,000 crore (Rs 280 billion) in licence fee, interest and penalties and the rest in spectrum usage charges". Vodafone CEO Nick Read "sought waiver of interest and penalties on its adjusted gross revenue (AGR) dues" and "to pay the principal over 10 years with a two-year moratorium". He refused to inject any more capital in the loss making venture. Khanna feels India is unlucky because "global trade growth slowed from 5.5% in 2017 to 2.1% in 2019," according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and "corporate strategies are increasingly being re-engineered for deeper dives into local markets in preference to operating across multiple markets". But, does the government want other markets? Customs duty has been increased on a large number of imports, apparently to protect domestic industry. "The road towards a $5 trillion economy leads through the rapid expansion of India's exports," wrote Sharma and Goyal. Deglobalization is not an excuse because "neighboring countries have boosted their exports in the same global environment". When the government increased tariffs in 2018, Prof Arvind Panagariya thought it was an isolated incident but, "Not only have tariff increases continued, licence permit raj-era protectionist vocabulary also has had a comeback." "There is no wisdom in producing at home products that we can buy abroad at lower cost using our export earnings," because it "threatens to return us from the turnpike on which we have been travelling all these years on to the dirt road", he wrote earlier. "No country has achieved developed status on the back of a purely domestic economy. Even in the US, the world's largest economy, the total production capacity for all manufactured agricultural goods exceeds by a wide margin what can be consumed not just in that country but also in Canada and Mexico," wrote Khanna. Will increased tariffs improve our industrial competitiveness? No, wrote Puja Mehra. Without competition local industries can sell low quality goods to a captive domestic market at high prices. Forget 'middle-income trap', wrote SA Soz, "For now, India is in the Nigeria zone." Competition is stressful. Better to stay at home.