This paper identifies the increasingly dominant role of intra-industry trade (IIT) in India’s total merchandise trade at different disaggregated levels of data during the post liberalization era (1990 – 2013) and explores the industry specific hypothesis to explain such trade. In an attempt to look into what forms the majority of India’s IIT, we use unit value dispersion criterion at HS- 6 digit level to disentangle total IIT into horizontal [technologically similar products] and vertical [both technologically superior (high vertical) and inferior (low vertical) products] IIT for major six Indian manufacturing industries catering to high magnitude of such trade. We find that technologically inferior quality products (low vertical IIT) have been dominant over the years in India’s export basket reflecting deterioration in the terms of trade. Further, in order to examine whether India’s overall IIT [in technologically similar or differentiated ranges of product technology] adheres to the comparative advantage hypothesis, we compute revealed comparative advantage (RCA) for each commodity group engaged in such trade for the selected manufacturing industries. We find that across all forms of IIT, the share of RCA has been low but has improved over the years. Given this observation, we explore econometrically as to what determines the magnitude of total IIT along with its various forms for the select industries. Indicating scale economies and catering for consumer’s preference diversity we find that the share of products engaged in trade positively influence the magnitude of said forms of trade.