New Delhi, July 18 -- Best of the Week is a weekly newsletter by Siddharth Sharma/Shravani Sinha. Subscribe to Mint's newsletters to get them directly in your inbox.

Picture this: It's 6.30 am, somewhere in Manesar or Hosur, and a factory supervisor is already on the phone, begging local contractors to send over enough workers to keep the assembly line running. This isn't a one-off crisis, it's India's new normal, and it's threatening the country's biggest economic ambition of becoming a manufacturing powerhouse.

Take Ankit Mathur of Greenway Grameen Infra. When demand for his biomass cookstoves spiked in March, he needed 40 extra workers. He got half, after two frustrating weeks of contractors ghosting his calls. In Bengaluru, a garmen...