As India and Türkiye ramp up their domestic manufacturing schemes, experts emphasise the need for cross-border collaboration over competition to build resilient supply chains and mutual technological growth.
India and Türkiye are trying to climb the same industrial ladder at the same time, and that is creating a risk of costly overlap. India approved more proposals under its Electronics Component Manufacturing Scheme on 30 March, while Türkiye’s HIT-30 programme is directing large incentives towards vehicles, batteries and semiconductors. Both governments want more advanced manufacturing at home, but that does not automatically make them rivals. According to the schemes themselves, the real opportunity lies in linking suppliers across borders rather than bidding against each other for the same full-scale factory.
India’s component scheme, approved by the Union Cabinet in March 2025 and later opened through a public portal and guidelines, is designed to build a stronger domestic electronics supply chain and connect Indian firms to global value chains. Reports on recent approvals suggest the government is still adding new projects, with investments aimed at boosting local production capacity. Türkiye’s HIT-30 programme, meanwhile, is meant to turn the country into a regional hub for high-technology manufacturing by 2030, using tax breaks, grants, financing, employment support and allocations of land and energy.
But the commercial relationship between the two countries remains modest. Bilateral trade reached $7.495 billion in 2025, yet the exchange still looks like conventional commerce rather than industrial integration. Türkiye’s exports to India are dominated by marble, sunflower oil, scrap steel, apples and basic chemicals, while India mainly ships vehicle parts and smartphones in the other direction. Direct investment is also thin, with stocks of just $144 million from Türkiye in India and $280 million the other way round as of 2024, and the bilateral economic committee has not met since 2014.
That gap matters because subsidy races can be wasteful. The 2025 Global Value Chain Development Report warns that multinational companies increasingly play governments off against one another to capture incentives. India and Türkiye can each offer cash, tax relief, land and support packages, but that does not guarantee deep technology transfer. A plant can create jobs and still leave most of the valuable know-how, components and intellectual property elsewhere.
A more productive approach would be to divide production stages. In automotive electronics, for example, an Indian firm could make flexible circuits, sensors or power-electronics boards, while a Turkish company supplies tooling, housings, thermal-management parts or integration work. Türkiye already has about 1,100 automotive component suppliers and more than 250 global suppliers operating as production bases, while roughly three quarters of its vehicle output was exported in 2025. India, by contrast, offers a much larger home market and an electronics push that could support deeper localisation if it is linked to external buyers rather than only domestic assembly.
Railways offer another possible bridge. India already makes rolling stock and a wide range of parts, from traction motors and gearboxes to converters, cable harnesses and electronic cards, and its railway exports were worth about $3.36 billion over the nine years to January 2026. Türkiye does not need to rebuild that ecosystem from scratch. Instead, its machinery, controls and maintenance firms could fill specific gaps in Indian projects, while Indian suppliers compete for Turkish rolling-stock and signalling contracts. Predictive-maintenance software and certified subassemblies would be more sensible than a politically branded joint train factory.
Renewables show the same logic. India said it had 172 GW of solar-module manufacturing capacity by March 2026, while Türkiye is backing solar cells, wind-turbine parts and batteries through HIT-30. Building separate protected supply chains for every technology could simply create excess capacity in the same low-margin stages. A more durable model would focus on shared components such as inverters, industrial controls, monitoring software, selected turbine parts and battery-management systems, with each side reserving support for the capabilities it regards as strategically important.
For that to work, governments would need to solve practical barriers. Local-content rules, tariffs, technical standards and intellectual-property concerns can all stop cross-border sourcing. Any pilot programme would need mutual recognition of testing, duty relief for inputs used in exports, clear ownership of jointly developed software and access to repair data. Public support should also depend on a conditional order from an actual buyer, otherwise the two states risk subsidising machinery that never enters production.
The next step would be political as much as technical. Ankara and New Delhi should revive their dormant economic committee with a tight brief: identify a few components that one country can supply and the other can qualify within two years. Export-credit agencies could finance tools, testing and working capital rather than full factories. The clearest sign of success would not be another announcement, but one Turkish-made component entering an Indian line and one Indian-made component entering a Turkish one.
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