This study revisits the ‘missing middle’ phenomenon of the Indian manufacturing sector. Though ‘missing middle’ has been described and analyzed by many studies, a key gap in the literature that we note is that the phenomenon of ‘missing middle’ has been taken as an accepted artifact of the Indian manufacturing sector. We look into the size-structure relation based on the argument that ‘class interval based’ and ‘aggregate level’ analyses of the industrial sector may be misleading. We use the firm level data available for Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) to check for the ‘missing middle’. We look for the trend both at the aggregate and disaggregate levels. We are unable to find a ‘missing middle’, either at the aggregate or disaggregate level, once we drop the classification of data based on apriori class intervals. We find that most firms in India are small firms and there is no evidence of a clustering of firms at higher size categories.

这项研究重新审视了印度制造业的“中间缺失”现象。尽管许多研究已经描述并分析了“中间缺失”现象，但我们注意到的文献中的一个主要空白是，“中间缺失”现象已被视为印度制造业的公认产物。我们基于以下观点来研究规模结构关系：对工业部门的“基于类区间”和“总体水平”的分析可能会产生误导。我们使用可用于年度工业调查（ASI）的公司级数据来检查“中间缺失”。我们在总体和分解水平上都寻找趋势。一旦我们根据先验类别间隔删除了数据分类，就无法在总体或分解层次上找到“缺失的中间点”。