Supply Chain Resilience: From "Just-in-Time" to "Just-in-Case"

The COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war together triggered a fundamental re-engineering of global value chains, pushing firms and nations away from lean "just-in-time" models toward more redundant "just-in-case" approaches that prioritise resilience over pure cost efficiency.

Central to this shift is the China+1 strategy, in which firms deliberately diversify manufacturing locations to reduce over-reliance on any single country, alongside the broader practices of friend-shoring and ally-shoring, which relocate supply chains toward trusted geopolitical partners rather than the cheapest available location. India has positioned itself to benefit from this global reshuffling through Production Linked Incentive schemes spanning 14 sectors — including electronics, semiconductors, pharmaceutical active ingredients and solar cells — designed to plug India into more resilient global value chains. India has also joined the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative with Japan and Australia, and participates in the supply chain pillar of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.

For Mains, the strongest framing treats economic security as a dimension of national security in its own right, and highlights India's dual objective of pursuing self-reliance while simultaneously deepening global economic integration — captured in the phrase "Make in India for the World," which signals that indigenisation and export orientation are meant to reinforce rather than contradict each other.

A useful shorthand for this theme is remembering three linked terms: China+1 (the corporate strategy), friend-shoring (the geopolitical version of the same idea), and PLI (India's domestic policy tool to benefit from both). Keeping these three terms distinct but connected in your notes avoids the common mistake of conflating supply chain diversification as a private-sector phenomenon with government policy responses to it. Also worth noting: this shift has real fiscal implications, since redundancy and diversification typically cost more than pure just-in-time efficiency, meaning governments must weigh resilience gains against higher near-term production costs when designing incentive schemes like PLI.