Didn't work last time. How will it work this time?

 "While India had for some time prided itself on being the world's 'fastest growing economy', it has since fallen far from that pedestal. And the decline began much before Covid hit," "Thus, presenting the 2018-19 Budget, Arun Jaitley announced that he was making a 'calibrated departure' from the policy of the previous two decades of cutting tariffs by enhancing some of them. Since then India has been raising import duties on more and more tariff lines as the philosophy of 'import substitution' -- tried and failed in post-independence years leading up to the 1991 liberalization when India began to integrate with global markets -- made a comeback." Import substitution is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision of 'Atmanirbhar Bharat', which means 'self-reliant India'.  During a speech on 13 May, "Modi used the word, 'Atmanirbhar' at least 19 times and 'Atmanirbharta' seven times. From 1951, India adopted a policy of Five Year Plans for its economy and, "With each passing plan-period, the country adopted more and more restrictive controls on imports such as higher import duties, massive license-permit raj on who could import what, how much and for what reason," wrote Udit Misra. This led to black marketing of imports, promoted inefficient domestic industries and sale of import quota at higher price. Consumers got shoddy goods at high prices. "Till about 1990, India and China had roughly the same annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP)." China's exports grew from about 1% of global exports in 1980 to 13% in 2018, while India's exports declined from 2.2% of global trade to 1.7% in 2018. "Between 1991 and 2014, average tariffs declined from 125 percent to 13 percent. However, since 2014, there have been tariff increases in 3,200 out of 5,300 product categories, affecting about $300 billion or 70 percent of total imports," wrote Subramanian and Chatterjee. The largest increases have been since 2018 based on the perception that India's growth since 1991 was not related to exports, especially manufacturing exports. Not true. India's overall exports grew by an average of 13.4% annually between 1995 and 2018, manufacturing exports grew by an average of 12.1% annually. "Bangladesh is doing well because it's following the path of previous Asian tigers," wrote Andy Mukherjee. "India, however, has gone the other way, choosing not to produce the things that could absorb its working age population of 1 billion into factory jobs." For economic recovery following the Covid crisis "in India's current circumstances, India does not have the luxury of abandoning export orientation" because "India's market is too small to sustain any serious import substitution strategy or even as a way of offering investors the domestic market as bait and incentivising them to export." Meanwhile, people are cutting their expenditure because of a fear of high prices and job losses. The government thinks that there can be no balance of payments crisis as in 1991 because we have over $551 billion in foreign currency reserves. But foreign exchange markets reached $6.6 trillion per day in April 2019. That's an awfully huge ocean.