The Finance Secretary’s folders are still on the desk when the next office comes in, and this one brings no table of accounts. A district collector puts down a rolled map of India and a single folder, then weights the corners of the map with the Finance Secretary’s two folders because nothing else is to hand. The map is blank except for the state lines. Beside it is a box of coloured pins.
“Everyone who has ever wanted a factory has asked me one question,” the Collector says. “Why can’t I put it here? I have to give the same answer each time. Not here, because this is missing, and not there, because that is.”
You ask which one is missing. “That is the trouble. Never the same one.”
Folder A is thin. Three problems, the Collector says, are usually blurred into one: land, power, and the city a worker must live in.
Land, power, cities
- Land. 7.4 percent of Indian firms name land as their main obstacle (South Asia 5.2 percent, lower-middle-income countries 3.5 percent). Land titles are presumptive, not conclusive, and 68 percent of cadastral maps are digitised.
- Land, the building rules. A factory on a 5,000 square metre plot can be forced to give up as much as 69 percent of it to meet building standards: Rs 1.58 crore and up to 509 jobs lost, by the Survey’s example.
- Power. Transmission and distribution losses: 14.5 percent of output in India, 3.1 percent in China. Aggregate technical and commercial losses fell from 22.62 percent in FY14 to 15.04 percent in FY25.
- Power, the distribution companies. Profit of Rs 2,701 crore in FY25, against a loss of Rs 67,962 crore in FY14. Accumulated losses still rose from Rs 5.5 lakh crore in 2020-21 to Rs 6.47 lakh crore in 2024-25, on debt of Rs 7.26 lakh crore.
- Cities. Indian cities raise under 0.6 percent of GDP in revenue of their own; urban property tax is 0.15 percent of GDP. The ten largest cities hold about 9 percent of the population and 28 percent of output.
- Two recent tests. 11 August 2025: Punjab withdrew its land-pooling policy. 2 April 2026: Parliament passed a Bill making Amaravati the sole capital of Andhra Pradesh.
Read down the page and each line is a different department’s file. The Collector reads them as one. A plot of land with a clear title, no power, and no town within an hour is a plot that stays empty. A powered plot with no title stays in court.
You look at the power line the longest. A shortage is a tax on a factory. A study of Indian plants found that outages cut average plant revenue and surplus by 5 to 10 percent. The folder’s two loss figures are different measures, transmission and distribution losses against aggregate technical and commercial losses, so they do not subtract.
The Collector opens Folder B and puts a finger on one sentence. It is the reason for the pins.
What fixing one input does
- Credit. After India widened the credit that banks had to lend to small firms in 2006, a firm facing no other constraint raised its sales by 100 percent. A firm facing five other barriers raised them by about a third as much.
- Electricity. Rural electrification reached over 400,000 villages. After three to five years its economic effects were limited: it reduced welfare in small villages and earned a 33 percent return in large ones.
- Roads. A US$40 billion rural roads programme moved workers out of farming. It did not change farm outcomes.
“Credit, power, roads: each was spread across the country,” the Collector says. “The studies find modest effects, and in the credit case the gain shrank where the firm faced other barriers.”
This is the pattern the folder is built to show: an input delivered where its partners are missing buys less than it costs. It is not proof that every such programme fails. The evidence on any single input is mixed, and the Collector says so before you ask.
The map and the pins are the other half of the argument. Put one pin on the map for each thing a factory needs: land that is ready, power that stays on, a workforce, a road or a port, somewhere to live. Spread evenly over the country, the pins make a scatter in which no place has all five. Stacked on six or eight places, they make a cluster. The Collector sets the box of pins down in front of you. “You can spread the money across seven hundred districts. Or you can choose.”
You choose. The choice is the hard part, because every pin you place is a pin you did not place in some other state, and the people who govern it will not thank you.
You write the rule before you write the list. Six to eight industrial clusters, and five to ten city-regions, chosen by published criteria in a challenge mode: a place qualifies when its land is audited and certified ready, its power has a feeder and a metered bill, and its city can show how its workers will live. The last of these is not a rhetorical flourish. The Budget has announced City Economic Regions at Rs 5,000 crore each over five years, in challenge mode, with results-linked financing. The Smart Cities Mission completed 91 percent of its projects (7,380 of 8,075) and invested Rs 1.47 lakh crore; it closed on 31 March 2025. The book infers that the same cities, with the thin revenue in Folder A, will have to maintain what the Mission built; neither source says who does.
Your opponents will say the list is rigged. Test the list the way this book tests every power: would you accept it in an opponent’s hands? You write the criteria down before the places are named, so that the same sheet decides for whoever holds the office after you.
On the other side of the map the Collector places two pins side by side. One is Amaravati. Farmers there gave up land voluntarily, in return for developed plots and ten-year annuities; tenant farmers were reported the worst hit. In April 2026 Parliament passed a Bill making Amaravati the sole capital. The other is Punjab. Its June 2025 plan to pool 65,533 acres met statewide opposition and a High Court stay, with no environmental or social impact assessment, and it was withdrawn on 11 August.
The Collector does not say what to conclude. You can read the difference in the folder yourself. One scheme has now been followed by a statute naming the capital. The other was a policy, and it was withdrawn within weeks. Whether the statute will protect the landowners’ terms has not been tested.
You say no to everyone who is not on the map. On the Triage Sheet the stamps go down: R14, the Lock-in Rule. The cluster criteria, published before the names. Land audited before anyone is asked to give it up.
Triage sheet: 8 of 40 lines filledThe Collector rolls the map but leaves the pins on the desk, a handful of them red. Nobody has yet been told which district is in the first batch. The folder under the pins carries one question, and you read it.
Door D4 · closedWhy can't I put a factory here?The Collector goes out. The answer to the door starts with the paper a worker must carry, in a Guangzhou detention centre in 2003, before it reaches a field in West Bengal. Six hours to the microphone.