Uday Kotak, Asia’s richest banker and one of India’s premier industry captains, has laid bare the inner workings of the playbook China uses to give effect to its slow but certain capture of the Indian market.

To get an idea of the extent of Chinese industry’s reach, one needs only look at the size of India’s imports from China which currently stands at $60 billion, Kotak said in an interview with ET Now.

China has not only become the world’s factory in the last one decade or two, it has also seized large swathes of many countries’ local markets including India’s, data shows.

During the time China was rising to become a trade powerhouse, could Indian industry have done things differently?

In his exposition, the Kotak Mahindra Bank CMD shed light on how Chinese industry aced the global game while Indian industry was left languishing with the exception of a few sectors.

He brought up pricing to explain this: there is emerging a clear possibility that manipulative pricing by Chinese players may have long loaded the dice against Indian factories.

According to Kotak, if this actually was the case, it would then be grossly unfair to blame Indian businesses for failing to stand up to Chinese competition adequately, because they simply were not left with the wherewithal.

In the interview, Kotak further decoded the raw deal domestic businesses got from China: in sector after sector, segment after segment, China was able to dramatically under-price its goods, with the result that many Indian manufacturers went out of business. And once Chinese suppliers captured the market this way, many of them could raise prices at will because there was no strong local competitor left.

Manipulative pricing is exactly the reason behind the raging US-China trade war, and India must put a premium on getting stronger so that such unfair competition could be kept at bay, Kotak cautioned.

Focus on execution is the the most critical need of the hour for India, and the government must focus on getting its policies right and making sure that they showed results on the ground, he added.

Execution is going to have major implications for Modi‘s pet Atmanirbharta push too, Kotak insisted. India will need two Es to make itself truly self-reliant, exports being the other E apart from execution, he said.

How to grow net exports and how to cut down the time for policy execution — these two questions are going to decide the success or failure of India’s self-reliance mission, he added.

India must do whatever it takes to strengthen its exports because that is the true proof of a country’s ability to be competitive, and the government must send out a consisent message that it is willing to walk the talk on this, Kotak offered, along with the reminder that delay in payments or incentive by the government could hinder the export push seriously.

Kotak thinks that this government is largely on the right track so far, given Modi’s focus on infrastructure and the integrated — as opposed to bits and pieces — approach that he opted for. He reckons that with Rs 110 lakh crore to be spent in the next few years, there will be major job creation and demand stimulus.

Kotak points out two things that Modi government must tackle urgently — a) lockdown-related uncertainties have to end, and states must not leave a growth turnaround solely to the Centre; and b) India may not have enough supply, which will cause major problems with the eventual return of demand, much of which (70-80%) is already back.

“I genuinely believe we are no longer moving to a new normal, we are moving to a world in finance, technology and business to a never normal world,” he said.