The COVID-19 pandemic constituted a natural experiment for supply chain resilience theory of unprecedented scale — simultaneously disrupting demand, supply, logistics, and labour across all geographies and sectors, and creating observable variation in firm-level recovery trajectories that can be attributed to pre-pandemic resilience investments. India's manufacturing sector, characterised by high import dependence for electronic components, pharmaceutical APIs, and specialty chemicals — concentrated in Chinese supply chains that faced both production shutdowns and export restrictions — experienced average supply chain disruption scores of 64.2/100 during the April-June 2020 peak disruption period, with high variation across firms ranging from 28.4 (highly resilient) to 91.8 (severely disrupted). This study exploits this natural experiment to quantify the return on supply chain resilience investment, examining 180 BSE-listed manufacturers across pharmaceutical, automotive, chemical, and textile sectors over 2018-2024. Supply chain resilience is measured through a 28-item instrument covering multi-sourcing breadth, geographic diversification, inventory buffer strategy, demand forecasting maturity, supplier relationship depth, and digital supply chain integration. ESG integration — specifically environmental and social supply chain standards — is hypothesised as a resilience amplifier through supplier relationship depth and information sharing. Difference-in-differences analysis comparing high-resilience versus low-resilience firms across the pandemic disruption window confirms that a one-standard-deviation improvement in pre-pandemic resilience score reduces revenue impact of equivalent disruption by 28.4% (p<0.001) and accelerates recovery to pre-pandemic revenue levels by 6.2 months (p<0.001). ESG-integrated supply chain management adds an independent resilience premium of 12.6% disruption impact reduction.
Nandini Sharma Ramesh Krishnamurthy (Thu,) studied this question.