Methodology · the rules of the board
What counts as unlocked?
A tile lights when repeated activity, durable institutions, and consequential scale change what a country can plausibly build next.
1. The unit is capability
A capability is a repeatable social or productive ability: reliable power, technicians at scale, complex assembly, interoperable payments, or industrial research.
Policies, institutions, assets, and outputs provide evidence. National capability also requires breadth, durability, and accumulated domestic knowledge.
2. Three board states
| State | Meaning | Boundary |
|---|---|---|
| ✓ Unlocked | Visible at consequential national or sectoral scale, repeated over time, with institutions and skills that survive one project. | Universal, world-leading, or evenly distributed. |
| ◒ Unlocking | Multiple investments and outputs point in the same direction. Duration, domestic depth, or diffusion remains under evaluation. | Future progress remains contingent. |
| × Locked | Available evidence falls below the national-scale threshold at that snapshot. | Local activity and competent institutions may still exist. |
3. Snapshot placements are editorial hypotheses
The selector uses 1960, 1980, 1991, 2000, 2010, 2016, and 2023. These dates capture changes in development regimes: post-independence institution building, the East Asian industrial turn, Indian liberalisation, the services takeoff, infrastructure and China’s frontier turn, India’s digital-rail inflection, and the latest broadly comparable data.
The 25 × 5 placement matrix contains editorial classifications. Sources attached to a tile provide context for its definition and the Indian reading; comparator-path sources support the broad country sequence. Each of the 125 country–capability cells remains open to scrutiny and revision.
“Modelled by: 2000” records a judgment that the capability had reached national relevance by that broad snapshot. A 1960 placement means the capability was present at the study’s earliest observation point.
4. The double-check rule
Every material claim in the essay and every trap has at least two registered sources. The preferred pairing is one primary or official series plus one institutionally separate analysis. Examples include RBI plus BIS analysis, government electronics reports plus an IMF productivity assessment, or WHO manufacturing evidence plus UN Comtrade exports.
Institutional independence requires distinct data streams. A ministry press release and annual report may repeat one dataset; repeated evidence keeps a moderate confidence label.
Source hierarchy
- Primary administrative data, official statistical series, filings, and mission records.
- Multilateral datasets and analytical reports with disclosed methods.
- Peer-reviewed or established independent survey programmes.
- Government or industry claims, explicitly labelled and paired where possible.
5. Scale, depth, and diffusion are separate
A million assembled phones demonstrate scale. Domestic tooling, components, process control, and engineering feedback demonstrate depth. Productivity gains across many firms demonstrate diffusion. The production branch refuses to substitute one for another.
The same distinction applies to knowledge. An elite laboratory can produce a frontier mission. A frontier research system repeatedly generates important work across universities, firms, laboratories, and sectors.
6. Comparator selection
China, South Korea, the United States, and Vietnam expose different sequences of capability accumulation:
- China: labor reallocation and manufacturing scale before frontier R&D.
- South Korea: education and export learning before indigenous industrial research.
- United States: an existing industrial base combined with procurement, universities, and capital.
- Vietnam: rapid export assembly with limited domestic supplier participation.
7. Important limitations
- State variation is large. Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Gujarat, Kerala, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, and other states occupy different positions. A state layer is a future extension.
- National data arrive late. The board stops at a 2023 comparative snapshot even where 2024–26 national figures exist.
- Prerequisites express common enabling relationships. Political choices, external markets, conflict, and technology can change sequences.
- GDP shares describe economic structure. A declining manufacturing share can coexist with rising manufacturing output.
- R&D spending is an input. Institutional and output evidence supply the measures of research quality and commercial impact.
8. Falsification and revision
The framework should change if outcomes repeatedly violate its prerequisites. Manufacturing-productivity gains alongside flat supplier depth would weaken the production branch. Broad learning gains alongside flat teaching capacity would weaken the people branch. Durable formal-job creation traceable to digital rails would strengthen the diffusion thesis.
Corrections will change the public board. The source registry records what each reference supports; future revisions will be dated here.
9. Build-time integrity checks
The repository includes a validation script. The build fails when a claim has fewer than two references from separate institutional groups, a source ID is missing, a URL is not HTTPS, a tile lacks contextual evidence, a country mapping is incomplete, the year control diverges from the data, or a source confidence label is invalid.
The validator checks structure and sourcing. Interpretation remains open to evidence and revision.