Small is not the same as dishonest.
The fear is that a supplier overstates its capacity. The evidence points somewhere more ordinary and more useful: Indian manufacturing has real depth, and a great deal of it is genuinely small.
They said they could do forty thousand units. You have no idea whether that is true.
The evidence is about structure, not deception
A study reported by the US Fashion Industry Association found Indian apparel factories to be primarily small and medium-sized, which could limit their ability to fulfil large-volume orders. First-hand reports from other sectors describe similarly modest facilities. What this describes is a supply base of genuine capability at a scale that may not match your order — not a habit of lying about it.
That reframes what you should be asking
If the risk were dishonesty, the answer would be suspicion. Because the risk is mismatch, the answer is arithmetic: what the unit can actually produce in the time you need, against what you are asking of it. A supplier can be entirely honest about its capacity and still be wrong about your order, because nobody did that sum out loud.
Capacity is not a single number
A factory's output depends on what else is on its order book, how many stages it performs itself, whether your product competes for the same machines as its existing work, and what happens during festival periods and seasonal peaks. A headline capacity figure quoted in isolation answers almost nothing.
Before you commit.
Machinery and lines relevant to your product, observed rather than described.
Whether your order would share capacity with existing commitments.
And which depend on other units, whose capacity is then also part of your answer.
Whether it accounts for the current order book, or describes an empty factory.
Sometimes the useful finding is that a capable supplier is simply the wrong size for this order.
What it cannot do.
Capacity assessed today describes today. An order book changes, and a supplier who could take your volume in March may not be able to in October. What an assessment gives you is a grounded picture at a point in time, dated, so you know what it is and is not.
Put the decision in front of us.
Tell us what you are buying and where you have got to. If verification is not the right next step, we will say so.