How India Lives analysis shows how India’s manufacturing prowess is spread across its districts

India exported almost $400 billion of manufactured goods in FY26, but those exports come from only a small number of locations.

Globally, manufacturing and manufacturing exports tend to be highly concentrated within countries—whether it is giant factories in Shenzhen in China, or the gems and jewellery clusters in Surat, there are very real reasons why firms in an industry tend to group together. These include everything from access to credit, a customer base, and perhaps most importantly, access to skilled manpower. As a result, exports tend to be clustered regionally as well.

This shows up in the data for India as well. Ten districts in India accounted for close to 40% of manufacturing exports last year. Jamnagar in Gujarat, the location of Reliance’s massive refinery, is the biggest exporting district with close to $36.6 billion in exports last year.  

This was followed by Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu, one of the locations chosen by Apple to assemble iPhones in India. Among cities, Pune, Mumbai, and Bengaluru also rank within the Top 10.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons to ensure that exports are spread across a wide number of regions. The spread of industries which are competitive in global export markets across a wide range of locations ensures that larger parts of the country share in manufacturing success stories. Lessening the concentration of exports is desirable even from a risk perspective.

A major natural disaster, for instance, could knock out key exporting factories within a single location, causing supply chain shocks further down the line.  

To this end, the government too, through its One District One Product and Districts as Export Hubs initiative, has sought to increase the participation of districts in exports.

There is still a long way to go though. There are 69 districts in the country which each exported more than billion dollars in manufacturing goods in 2025-26. Together they accounted for 83% of total manufacturing exports.

How did we put this data together? The Ministry of Commerce releases data on exports by district. The data gives us rich insights into the spread of export clusters across the country.

To analyse the data, we downloaded the data from the ministry’s trade analytics portal at the two-digit level (essentially these are broad product categories such as automotives, electronic goods, petrochemicals, etc).

We filtered the data to exclude exports of agri-products and mining exports, though we kept the outputs of the food products industry.

Some of the data does not allocate exports to any given district. In other cases the data is allocated to a district, but allocated to a state different than where it should be. These rows have been eliminated from the data, but had little effect on the final result. These rows accounted for less than 1% of the value of exports for 2025-26.