Since its launch in 2014, India’s Make in India initiative has evolved from a branding exercise into a comprehensive strategy that is reshaping the country’s industrial landscape, with a renewed emphasis on semiconductors, electronics, and deepening domestic production capabilities.
When Narendra Modi launched Make in India at Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi on 25 September 2014, the pitch was larger than a branding exercise. According to reports at the time, he told an audience of global business leaders that India should be seen not just as a market but as a place to build, design and innovate, while the campaign itself was framed around 25 priority sectors, a new website and a promise of faster responses to investor queries. The message was clear: India wanted to become a manufacturing destination, not simply a consumer one.
That ambition took on greater urgency because India’s economy had become heavily tilted towards services while manufacturing lagged behind. The idea behind Make in India, and later Atmanirbhar Bharat, was to close that gap by building industrial capacity in areas where imports dominated, particularly phones, electronics and semiconductors. Over time, the government paired that vision with a sequence of policies aimed at making production in India more attractive, from easier foreign investment rules to targeted incentives for factories and supply chains.
One of the earliest tools was the Phased Manufacturing Programme for mobile handsets, which nudged companies to localise more of the value chain over time. That approach was later reinforced by capital support schemes such as M-SIPS and SPECS, which helped draw investment into components, semiconductor-related facilities and other electronics manufacturing. The result was a rapid increase in the number of handset plants in India, even if much of the industry initially remained focused on final assembly rather than deep domestic value addition.
The bigger shift came with the Production Linked Incentive framework, which tied support to actual output and sales rather than promises on paper. Across 14 sectors, the scheme architecture has helped pull in more than ₹2.40 lakh crore in investment, generated over 14.15 lakh jobs and supported exports above ₹15.2 lakh crore by 31 March 2026, according to the figures cited in the article. In electronics, this translated into a dramatic expansion of mobile phone manufacturing, a steep fall in imports of finished handsets and a much larger domestic production base than existed a decade earlier.
The change is visible on factory floors. Foxconn’s Tamil Nadu and Karnataka operations, Tata Electronics’ fast-growing footprint and the rise of home-grown manufacturers such as Dixon Technologies all point to a more complex industrial ecosystem than India had in 2014. The latest policy moves are designed to push that ecosystem further up the value chain. The new Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme, cleared by the Union Cabinet in 2026, is meant to encourage higher local sourcing, more Indian design work and stronger research and development, while the Electronics Component Manufacturing Scheme is intended to deepen domestic production of parts that still come largely from abroad.
Semiconductors are the next frontier. India’s first phase of semiconductor policy helped approve 12 projects and build momentum in chip assembly, testing and packaging, while the second phase, approved in July 2026, expands support for design, equipment, materials, fabrication and advanced packaging. That matters because India already has a substantial chip-design workforce and a growing base of technical capability, even if large-scale fabrication remains in its early stages. Put simply, the country is no longer only trying to assemble electronics more cheaply; it is trying to own more of the industrial stack, from design to production.
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