New Delhi, Sept. 23 -- Though India has been making progress on its manufacturing mission, the country must strive harder to become the world's factory. On Tuesday, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman exhorted Indian industry to lift its ambition from "Made in India" production to "Imagined in India" success.

This demands an ecosystem for products that are not just manufactured domestically, but also conceived, designed and developed here for the world. "Manufacturing scale is important, but the next stage is to capture more of the value that comes from design, engineering, patent, software, technology and know-how," she said.

Indeed, while we are producing much more for export-as in the case of mobile handsets-the country captures only...