An Indian company that writes brilliant software for a foreign platform gets paid well for the work. It almost never owns a slice of what that platform eventually becomes worth. This is the exact distinction Naoroji’s arithmetic always hinged on, not whether India earns money, but what kind of money it earns, and what kind slips past it entirely.
Dadabhai Naoroji wasn’t just saying the British took India’s money. He was showing, with the actual records, how an entire monetary system could make a growing, trading economy poorer with every transaction, legally, quietly, and year after year.
While Indian shipyards did construct some merchant tonnage under license regimes and subsidy schemes, the emphasis stayed on building capacity fot Navy and Coast Guard, not for the commercial global market. The long term result was that Indian commercial shipbuilding never developed the scale, supply-chain depth or export orientation that enabled East Asian yards to capture the world’s merchant fleet.
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