This chapter shows how in parallel to the regulated governance in telecommunications uncovered in Chapter 7, the perceived strategic value of labor-intensive industries dominated by rural small-scale producers, showcased by textiles, for national self-reliance and neoliberal development, shape the centralized governance by the Indian government. The cross-time sector and company case studies reveal that at a time when centralized market coordination in labor-intensive, less value-added textiles is eliminated around the world, India created a central ministry and other sector-specific bureaucracies in textiles associated with nationalist narratives of Gandhian Swadeshi self-reliance in the 1980s following internal political and economic crises. Endowed with limited resources and regulatory capacity, the centralized governance of the textile ministry has introduced extensive competition in the neoliberal era and deliberately intervened in market developments. In addition to subsidizing industrial upgrading and deregulating market entry, business scope, and trade, the textile ministry has nationalized large-scale textile mills of the organized sector during economic slowdowns. Moreover, fiscal and protectionist trade policies have also cushioned the survival of small-scale, labor-intensive handlooms in apparel and clothing and the highly polluting power looms dominant in more capital-intensive technical textiles even as the state promotes export-oriented industrialization.

This chapter exposes how the perceived strategic value of capital-intensive, value-added sectors, represented by telecommunications, for national security and resource management, interacts with sectoral structures and organization of institutions. The centralized governance by the Russian state since the collapse of the Soviet Union and further reenforced during the Putin era witnessed in these sectors shows the federal government consolidating in one corporate entity the ownership and management of civilian and dedicated landlines of the Soviet military industrial complex. Centralized market coordination presides over the predominantly privately owned mobile and value-added service providers operating in fiercely competitive markets deregulated in the 1990s. The cross-time sector and company cases further show various lower-level bureaucracies and non-sector-specific economywide rules regulate telecommunications equipment privatized after Soviet collapse, perceived less strategic than the state-owned and managed backbone infrastructure. Similar interacting strategic value and sectoral logics apply to Information Technology (IT) Software, a sector which has benefitted from former science and technology personnel of the Soviet defense industry. In the face of perceived security threats from within and without after economic crises and conflicts with neighboring countries, however, the state has reenforced its control of the information communications infrastructure, including RuNet and cybersecurity, designated strategic assets.