What to Read in Indian Express Editorial( Topic and Syllabus wise)

Editorial 1 : On marine engine production, India must set sail on its own

Context

Without the ability to build them, India will be dependent on foreign suppliers, creating technological chokepoints.

Maritime development

• India is making bold moves in shipbuilding.
• The 2025 Union budget laid the foundation for a maritime resurgence, with mega clusters, a Rs 25,000-crore Maritime Development Fund, customs duty exemptions, and infrastructure status for large vessels.
• Strategic tie-ups with global shipbuilding giants and major private investments signal serious intent to make India a top five shipbuilding nation by 2047.
• To truly lead, India must build what powers the ship.A hull without an engine is just a shell, strategically dependent on foreign suppliers.
• Marine engines typically account for 15–20 per cent of a ship’s cost and are central to its performance, emissions, and life cycle.

Marine engines

• Presently, over 90 per cent of enginesrated above 6 MW installed on Indian commercial and naval vessels are sourced from a concentrated group of five global manufacturers — MAN Energy Solutions (Germany), Wärtsilä (Finland), Rolls-Royce (UK), Caterpillar-MaK (US/Germany), and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (Japan).
• This oligopolistic concentrationcreates a technological chokepoint.
• Any disruption in diplomatic or trade relations, export control regime, or intellectual property licensing can effectively immobilise India’s shipbuilding programme.
• These engines are embedded with proprietary ECUs, closed-source control software, and IP-restricted components, making India dependent on foreign firms not just for procurement, but for diagnostics, updates, and even spares. This exposes India to rising export control risks.
• Key supplier countries have tightened regulations under frameworks like the EU Dual-Use Regulation, US EAR, and Japan’s METI controls. These can be denied on national security grounds at any time.

The challenges

• There are several challenges. First, we lack access to modern marine engine designs.Marine engine design is a critical determinant of propulsion efficiency, thermal performance, emissions compliance, structural durability, and system integration in large vessels.
• Second, India’s most significant hurdle in building large marine engines is metallurgical, a foundational challengethat cuts across materials science, manufacturing precision, and component durability.
• Materials like high-chromium steels, nickel-based superalloys, and thermally stable compositesare essential, but India’s capacity to produce such materials in large quantities remains underdeveloped.
• Third, “tribology”, the science of wear, lubrication, and friction, is another critical bottleneck.
• High-efficiency marine engines demand components with tailored surface properties to reduce wear and frictional losses over thousands of operating hours.
• This necessitates advanced coatings like thermal barrier ceramics, diamond-like carbon and plasma-sprayed composites,which require both sophisticated application techniques and precision control.
• Fourth, it’s impossible to build next-gen marine engines when our top institutes still train students on outdated models.

The musts for India

• To address these gaps, India must shift its strategy from relying solely on large public- and private-sector firms,which have struggled to deliver full-stack indigenous marine engines, and instead invest in a new generation of tech start-ups.
• The government should facilitate this through targeted innovation missions, design-linked incentives, and dedicated funding for marine propulsion R&D, backed by defence and shipping sector demand.
• Start-ups must be supported not only with capital, but also through access to testbeds, IP support, and public procurement guarantees.
• To develop large marine engines, India must build a dedicated propulsion design ecosystem.
• Equally critical is access to domain-specific software for 3D modelling and mechanical design; combustion and thermodynamic simulation; structural and thermal stress analysis; and embedded control system development.

Conclusion

India has made visible strides in other areas of shipbuilding. But without the ability to build our own marine engines, we are laying the keel for dependency. A vessel may be built in India, flagged in India, and crewed by Indians, but unless we build the engine, we will never truly steer our own course.

 

Editorial 2 : India releases provisional GDP estimates: What the data show

Context

The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) on Friday released two interrelated data sets on India’s national income and the size of its economy.

How is national income measured?

• Economic growth is measured using two metrics.
• Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is calculated by adding up all the expenditures made in the economy,including expenditures by Indians in their individual capacity, expenditures by governments, expenditures by private businesses, etc. This provides a picture of the demand side of the economy.
• Gross Value Added (GVA) looks at the supply side. It effectively measures the contribution of each sector of the economy by calculating and summing the value added (or income) at each stage of production.

Both GDP and GVA are linked

• They measure the same economic performance but through different routes. Their relationship can be spelled out using the following equation:
• GDP = (GVA) + (taxes earned by government) — (subsidies provided by government)
• MoSPI provides GDP and GVA data both in nominal terms (in present day prices) and real terms (after taking away the effect of inflation).
• Both nominal and real data have their own analytical significance.

What are the key takeaways?

• There are four key takeaways from the data released on Friday.
• Nominal GDP & its growth: India’s nominal GDP grew to 9.8% by the end of March 2025 over the GDP in FY24.
• When converted into US dollar terms, the size of India’s economy was $3.87 trillion.
• It is noteworthy that the growth of the nominal GDP is less than 10%: at 9.8%, FY25’s growth was the third-slowest since the current government took charge in 2014, and the sixth slowest growth rate in nominal GDP since India liberalised its economy in 1991.
• It also shows how the nominal GDP growth rate has been decelerating. The Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) since 2014-15 stands at 10.3% while the CAGR since the start of the second term of the NDA government in 2019 stands at 9.8%

Real GDP & its growth

• While the size of the economy uses nominal GDP data, international comparisons of growth rate are done based on the growth rate of real GDP.
• This is because inflation differs from country to country,and only real GDP provides a genuine understanding about how many actual new goods and services were produced in a particular year.
• India’s real GDP grew by 6.5% in FY25 to reach a level of Rs 188 trillion. The deceleration in the pace of real GDP growth — compared to FY24, when the growth rate was 9.2% — is even more stark than in the case of nominal GDP growth.
• The gap between the real and nominal GDP shows the effect of inflation in prices of goods and services.

GVA & sectoral health of economy

• The real GVA across the three main sectors of the Indian economy: Agriculture and allied activities(such as forestry, etc.); Industry (including sub-sectors such as manufacturing, construction etc.); and Services (including fields like financial services, trade, and hotels etc.)
• For FY 25, the real GVA grew by 6.4%, losing a step over the 8.6% growth in FY24. But notably, none of the sectors have grown at a CAGR anywhere close to 6% since 2019-20.

Manufacturing growth slower than agriculture

• Since 2019-20, manufacturing GVA has registered a slower growth rate (CAGR of 4.04%) than even agriculture and allied activities (4.72%).
• This explains, to some extent, the high urban — in particular, youth — unemployment in India.
• It also provides an understanding of why labour has been moving back to Indian villages, and joining agriculture and allied activities.

Conclusion

Boosting manufacturing growth has been a cornerstone for all governments, none more than the current one, which started the Make in India initiative in 2016. The weakness in the Indian manufacturing sector is the most important and worrisome takeaway from the latest economic growth data.