by alephnerd | 2025-12-17 22:07:04+00:00
> I used to live in Gurugram

Oh whoa. That's pretty wild! What years out of curiosity?

> I thought it was so strange where the Maruti Suzuki plant was - I've seen the trucks sluggishly trying to get around local (residential) traffic as the area around the plant has developed quite a bit, which is where my above anecdote originated

That's because Manesar didn't have an Inland Container Depot (dryports that provide direct rail access to ports) until recently [0] - the Delhi NCR ones were in the eastern (Palwal/Faridabad, Tughlakabad/Delhi, Dadri/Noida) or western side (Bawal/Rewari).

Also, depending on when you were in Gurgaon, Manesar has now basically become part of Gurgaon, with all the farmland in between now becoming China-style high rises. It reminds of how outer-ring Beijing began to transform 15 years ago.

> Cool to learn about Sanand which _seems_ like it has pretty good road access to the ports?

India tends to use rail freight for most exports. A 1 hour cargo truck drive to an ICD and then a 7 hour freight rail to a major terminal port ends up being more efficient than trying to build capacity near a port in a lot of cases in India.

> more on the ground reporting in ANY country would be wonderful for western news to do, but we have to spend all the reporting budget on white house shenanigans now... we're cooked

It's because of the economics of journalism. The GFC and Jihadi John led to margins falling [1] and insurance rising [2], which means most on-the-ground journalism is done by freelancers. But purchasing news from an aggregator like Reuters or Bloomberg gets very pricey very quickly.

At this point, for English-language India news, I'd recommend following Reuters, Bloomberg, or Nikkei Asia simply because they have the right mix of on-the-ground reporters, relationships with policymakers, and journalistic standards. There is a good ecosystem of policy/wonk oriented reporting in India as well (eg. The Print, The Secretariat, Policy Circle) that is similar in style to "The Wire China" but they can be pretty obtuse if you don't have the domain experience.

Outside of these kinds of sources, reporting about much of Asia is easily 3-5 years behind in most "mainstream" American media

> I was better aware of these types of clusters from Dubais free zones, which I found were marketed in a more understandable way

A lot of that was because back when Dubai was building out it's logistics network, it depended on Western capital. Indian manufacturing and logistics FDI opportunties are primarily marketed to Asian (Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and before 2021 Chinese) or Gulf investors, because in most cases "American" companies like Apple or funds like Blackrock let OEMs or SDFs respectively take the lead.

Outside of R&D/Services FDI, India is fairly disconnected from the West, and the recent push in electronics exports to the US is largely thanks to Asian players slowly shifting to India from China+Vietnam during COVID Zero.

[0] - https://www.thehindu.com/incoming/rail-minister-opens-gati-s...

[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-foreign-correspondents-are-...

[2] - https://theconversation.com/with-foreign-bureaus-slashed-fre...