NEW DELHI — A decade ago, the smartphone in an Indian pocket was almost certainly imported. Today, the odds are strong that it was assembled in India, and increasingly likely that it was built for export. That reversal — from one of the world’s great electronics buyers toward one of its manufacturers — is among the most consequential and least theatrical achievements of the Make in India decade.
The scoreboard
The headline numbers are striking. According to the Economic Survey 2025-26, India has become the world’s second-largest mobile manufacturer and its third-largest electronics exporter. Smartphone exports touched a record of roughly $30 billion in 2025, up from about $20.45 billion the year before, and the industry body ICEA has pointed to total mobile production approaching $75 billion for the fiscal year. The long arc is even more telling: mobile-phone exports have climbed from around ₹1,500 crore to nearly ₹2 lakh crore, and the number of mobile manufacturing units in the country has grown from just two in 2014-15 to roughly 300.
How it happened
None of this was accident or luck. It was policy — specifically, the production-linked incentive (PLI) schemes that paid manufacturers to make here and, crucially, to export. Under the large-scale electronics PLI, cumulative production of around ₹9.34 lakh crore and exports of ₹5.12 lakh crore had been recorded by September 2025, on an incentive investment a fraction of that size. The returns on that bet — jobs, factories, supplier ecosystems, foreign exchange — have vindicated a strategy that critics once dismissed as mere assembly.
And the strategy is now climbing the value chain. The Electronics Component Manufacturing Scheme, notified in 2025 with an outlay of nearly ₹22,919 crore, is designed to build the ecosystem of components — the unglamorous parts that decide how much value actually stays in the country. More ambitious still is the Semicon India programme, under which ten semiconductor units have already been approved, carrying cumulative investments of around ₹1.6 lakh crore. Chips are the hardest prize in electronics; an India that fabricates them is an India far harder to coerce.
Why ‘assembly’ was never the whole story
The familiar criticism — that India merely screws together parts made elsewhere — was always a snapshot mistaken for a trajectory. Every successful manufacturing nation, from Japan to South Korea to China, began with assembly and worked relentlessly up the ladder toward components, design and, finally, the core technologies. India is visibly on that ladder: from final assembly, to components, to semiconductors, each step capturing more value and deepening self-reliance.
The strategic dividend
There is a security logic here as much as an economic one. A country that depends on others for its phones, its networking gear and its chips is a country that can be squeezed in a crisis. Atmanirbhar Bharat, in electronics, is not autarky — India still trades, partners and imports — but it is resilience: the ability to make at home the things that matter most when the world turns hostile. The quiet revolution in India’s factories is, in the end, about more than exports and jobs. It is about a nation deciding that it will build its future rather than buy it.
