Embedded advantage and uneven policy access: evidence from India’s ODOP initiative

This article examines how entrepreneurs experience India’s One District One Product (ODOP) initiative in Maharashtra. Drawing on qualitative case studies of established and new entrant firms, it shows that policy access is mediated by varying combinations of caste, kinship, bureaucratic familiarity, market experience, and symbolic recognition. It develops embedded advantage as a middle-range heuristic for understanding how institutional and social resources shape differential policy uptake. A typology of new entrant firms is developed inductively from fieldwork. The article contributes to debates on institutional accessibility, entrepreneurial participation, caste stratification, and the redistributive limits of place-based industrial policy.