India, Feb. 3 -- Budget 2026-27 elevates competitiveness, rather than welfare, stimulus, or even growth, to a kartavya (duty). In doing so, it signals a quiet but consequential shift in how India understands its economic challenge. Growth, the budget implies, is no longer the hard part; remaining competitive in a fractured global economy is. This shift reflects a global environment that has become less appreciative of macroeconomic performance alone. Trade is increasingly shaped by geopolitics rather than efficiency, supply chains are being reconfigured under strategic pressure, and capital flows have grown more volatile and selective. In such a world, growth alone no longer guarantees stability or insulation. India enters this phase with notable strengths - real growth near 7%, inflation anchored, banks healthy, and the Union fiscal deficit contained at 4.8% of GDP. Public capital expenditure has risen from Rs.2 lakh crore in FY15 to Rs.12.2 lakh crore in FY27, and credit ratings have improved. Yet capital remains cautious and the rupee fragile. India, as the Economic Survey observes, is "punching below its weight" in global markets. The reason is structural. As a savings-deficient economy that runs a current account deficit in normal growth phases, India depends on foreign capital to support investment. The Survey highlights that this makes the economy more sensitive to global capital flows and limits the scope for sustained currency stability. Services exports, especially IT and business services, have provided an important buffer by growing faster than merchandise exports, but it is now evident that services alone cannot anchor long-term external resilience or raise economy-wide productivity. At India's scale, competitiveness has, therefore, become a binding constraint, in the sense of demanding greater productivity. Economies that rely on shelter or suppression eventually trade growth for fragility; those that raise productivity can sustain higher incomes, export resilience, and macroeconomic stability simultaneously. It is against this backdrop that the budget's competitiveness agenda should be read. Under its first kartavya, the budget identifies six intervention areas pointing at two key directions. The first is that competitiveness must be built through production ecosystems, not protection. Hence the sharp focus on scaling manufacturing in strategic and frontier sectors, reviving legacy industrial clusters, and creating "champion MSMEs". The emphasis is revealingly institutional. In biopharma, semiconductors, electronics, capital goods, and rare earths, the budget invests in regulatory speed, testing infrastructure, design capability, and supply-chain depth, along with capacity. The Rs.10,000 crore Biopharma SHAKTI programme, for instance, devotes as much attention to clinical trials networks and regulatory strengthening as to production itself. MSME policy similarly pivots away from protection toward lowering the cost of capital via a Rs.10,000 crore SME Growth Fund, expanded Trade Receivables Discounting System (TReDS) financing, and securitisation of receivables, aligning closely with the Survey's argument that capital costs, not labour costs, now bind competitiveness in India. The second proposition is that competitiveness is increasingly determined by economy-wide factor efficiency - how infrastructure, energy, and urban systems lower transaction costs and raise productivity. Rising public capital expenditure is now tightly linked to logistics efficiency through freight corridors, waterways, asset recycling via REITs, and risk-sharing mechanisms designed to crowd in private investment. Energy is framed explicitly in terms of stability and cost discipline, echoing the Survey's warning that inverted tariffs and poorly sequenced green transitions can undermine industrial viability. The emphasis on City Economic Regions reflects a recognition that productivity growth is now predominantly urban, constrained as much by governance and coordination failures as by capital scarcity. Read this way, the budget is internally coherent and notably restrained. It largely avoids the temptation of tariff-led protectionism, another point of alignment with the Survey, which cautions that upstream protection often acts as a tax on downstream exporters and erodes competitiveness rather than enhancing it. Instead, the State positions itself as an enabler of scale, speed, and discipline. Where this logic acquires a sharper edge is in the treatment of energy and climate in this budget. Climate policy is understood as an industrial and technological strategy in its own right. The global turn toward carbon pricing, carbon border adjustments, and green procurement is already reshaping manufacturing cost structures. Export competitiveness, particularly in carbon-intensive sectors, will now be determined as much by energy systems and emissions intensity as by productivity on the factory floor. At the same time, there is a notable realism about the risks. Poorly sequenced transitions can push up energy costs, worsen input-price inversion, and erode precisely the manufacturing base they are meant to future-proof. The budget's choice to embed energy security and price stability within the competitiveness framework rather than treating decarbonisation as a standalone objective reflects an implicit recognition of this trade-off. Whether India can convert its net-zero commitments into an advantage will depend not on targets alone, but on its ability to combine low-cost renewable energy, grid reliability, domestic manufacturing of green technologies, and regulatory predictability. Turning competitiveness from intent to action will hinge on more than just policy design. The agenda set out in the budget operates in an environment where outcomes will be shaped by coordination across levels of government. Differences in fiscal priorities, particularly the balance between revenue expenditure and capital formation at the state level will now matter more directly for investment conditions. This places renewed attention on the enabling role of State capacity. Many of the budget's competitiveness levers, whether in manufacturing, infrastructure, energy, or urban development, require predictability, timeliness, and consistency. Seen in this light, competitiveness as kartavya functions less as a claim about outcomes than as a discipline of self-strengthening. It places the budget within a global environment marked by volatile capital, fractured trade, and persistent uncertainty in which resilience must be built in advance rather than improvised in crisis. The emphasis, therefore, shifts away from episodic interventions toward the steady accumulation of capability with lower costs through productivity, buffers through diversification, and credibility through consistency. How far this framing translates into sustained competitiveness will depend not on any single provision, but on whether policy, institutions, and incentives reinforce one another over time....