Not to Shop Shelves. This Is the Bill Taken Apart — 1,500 Products, 97% of the Value — Asked Two Questions Each: What Does It Feed, and How Hard Would It Be to Buy Anywhere Else.
The Deficit Only Makes Sense if You Read Two Things About Each Product at the Same Time — What It Is Used for, and Why India Buys It from China and Not Elsewhere. These Two Rails Run Through Everything Below. One Is a Colour. The Other Is a Ring Around It.
Read the Bill by What Each Import Feeds. Only About a Fourteenth Is Finished Goods for Consumers. The Rest Is What Indian Factories Run On — and the Single Largest Block Feeds Integrated Chains That Cannot Be Unbundled Product by Product.
This Is the First Uncomfortable Fact: A Bigger China Bill Is, in Large Part, the Arithmetic of India Making More Things. Assemble More Phones, Formulate More Medicine, Install More Solar — Each Pulls in More Chinese Input.
Now Read the Same Bill by How Replaceable Each Line Is. It Splits into a Monopoly Problem and a Price Problem — and They Are Not the Same Conversation.
The ~12% Captive Is the Genuine Chokehold — Solar Wafers, Lithium Cells, Rare-Earth Magnets, Key Drug Ingredients, Displays. China Is Close to the Only Seller. The ~79% Sticky Is the Part People Misread: It Can Be Sourced Elsewhere, but China Is Cheaper, and Switching Would Raise the Price of the Indian Product That Depends on It.
Where the Money Sits When You Cross What It Feeds (Rows) with How Stuck We Are (Columns). Tap Any Cell to See What's Inside It.
Notice Two Corners. Captive Money Lives Only in the Supply Chains — Never in Consumer Goods. And the Consumable Corner Is Never Captive: It's the Discretionary Slice, the Part India Could Drop or Source Anywhere. The Trap and the Shopping Are in Opposite Corners.
Pick Something India Is Proud of Making. See the Chinese Inputs It Pulls in — Coloured by What They Feed, Ringed by How Replaceable They Are.
The Biggest Slice Is "Sticky" — Replaceable, but Chinese on Price. It's Tempting to Read That as Inertia. It Isn't. A Cheaper Input Is What Keeps the Finished Indian Good Competitive — at Home and in Export Markets.
A Local Vendor on a Thin Margin Can't Absorb a 30% Jump in a Key Input. It Flows into the Finished Price — and the Export Order, or the Domestic Price War, Is Lost. So "Replaceable" and "Should Be Replaced" Are Different Sentences. The Gap Between Them Is Cost, and It Is Why This Slice Stays Chinese.
Every One of These Could Be Made or Bought Elsewhere. China Just Lands Cheaper — So It Stays Chinese. The Forty-Eight Biggest Sticky Lines, by Value:
The Real Chokehold Is Small and Specific. For Each, the Same Story: Someone Else Could Supply It, but Hasn't Displaced China — Because China Owns the Hardest, Dirtiest, Most Capital-Heavy Step.
These Are the Lines Worth Watching. Rare Earths — the Sharpest Case — Get Their Own Tool Next. Everything Here Is Why the Word "Vulnerability" Is Earned, Stated Plainly, Not as Alarm.
The Bill Has More Than Doubled in a Decade — from ~$62bn in 2015-16 to $131.6bn Today. That Tracks India Assembling More Phones, Formulating More Drugs and Installing More Solar — Each Pulling in More Chinese Input. Not a Verdict; a Mechanism.
The Number to Watch Isn't the Headline. It's Whether the Captive ~$16bn Shrinks Over Five Years, and Whether the Inputs India Keeps Buying Start Showing up as Indian Value-Added and Exports — Dependence Turning into Capacity.
These Are the 1,500 Largest Lines of ~4,400 — Together 97% of the Value. Filter by What It Feeds, by How Stuck We Are, by Sector, or Search a Product — the Total Updates Live.
The Bill. Product-Line Values Are India's Imports from China at the Six-Digit HS Level, FY2025-26, from the Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence & Statistics (DGCI&S), Government of India. The 1,500 Lines Shown Are the Largest, Covering 97% ($127.7bn) of the $131.6bn Total; the Long Tail of ~2,900 Smaller Lines Is Overwhelmingly Sticky or Discretionary and Does Not Change the Picture.
Rail A — What It Feeds (Integrated Chain / Local Manufacturing / Both / Consumable) Is an End-Use Classification of Each Line. Rail B — How Replaceable (Captive / Sticky / Discretionary) Draws on Substitutability Analysis (GTRI, UN Comtrade, PIB / Department of Pharmaceuticals). Both Are Considered Editorial Judgments Meant to Be Argued with, Not Official Statistics.
China Share. Where a Line's China Dependence Is Individually Sourced, the Exact Figure Is Shown (e.g. "High ~85%"). For the Majority of Lines It Is Estimated at the Category Level and Shown Only as a Band — Near-Total, High, Majority or Partial — Marked "est." So the Reader Never Mistakes a Category Estimate for a Measured Customs Figure. Only the Import Values Themselves Are Hard DGCI&S Data.
Two Totals. DGCI&S Records Imports from China at $131.6bn; China's Own Customs Records Its Exports to India Higher (~$155bn), Largely via Hong Kong Routing and Valuation Differences. This Tool Uses the DGCI&S Basis Throughout.
Follow the Work — New Data Tools Every Week.