Twelve years after Make in India was launched with the ambition of turning India into a global manufacturing base, the initiative has produced a measurable industrial success story in electronics and mobile phones. But the same evidence shows a less convincing transformation in manufacturing’s overall place in the economy and its ability to generate jobs at the scale originally promised.
That contrast is the central lesson of the programme’s first twelve years. India has become more capable of producing selected technology goods, attracting capital and supporting a wider startup ecosystem. It has not yet demonstrated that these gains can be translated into a broad-based manufacturing economy with deep domestic supply chains, sustained employment growth and a manufacturing share of gross domestic product close to the original target.
The distinction matters because manufacturing policy is not only about factory output. It also shapes the geography of jobs, the growth of industrial towns, demand for logistics and utilities, the viability of smaller suppliers and the distribution of economic opportunity between large metropolitan regions and smaller cities. The Make in India experience therefore offers a test of whether targeted incentives can create an industrial system, rather than only expand production in a few high-performing segments.
The strongest evidence of progress comes from electronics. According to the figures cited in the report, electronics production increased from around Rs 1.9 lakh crore in 2014-15 to nearly Rs 13.11 lakh crore in 2025-26. Mobile phone production rose from roughly Rs 18,000 crore to Rs 6.27 lakh crore over the same period. India has moved from importing almost all the phones it used to consuming to producing nearly all of them domestically.
This change has been supported by the Production Linked Incentive scheme. By March 2026, the scheme had attracted about Rs 2.40 lakh crore in actual investment, generated approximately Rs 23.8 lakh crore in production and sales, supported exports worth around Rs 15.2 lakh crore and contributed to more than 14.6 lakh direct and indirect jobs, according to the report.
Those numbers show that industrial policy can influence where production takes place and can help establish new manufacturing capacity. They also show the importance of concentrating policy support in sectors where demand, global supply chains and domestic capabilities can reinforce one another. Electronics has become the poster child of Make in India partly because it combines a large domestic market with strong export potential and rapid technological change.
However, the electronics figures cannot by themselves establish that India has solved the broader manufacturing challenge. A successful sector may coexist with a relatively stagnant manufacturing share of the economy. The report cites estimates placing manufacturing’s share of GDP between 13 and 17 per cent, well below the original Make in India goal of 25 per cent by 2022, later extended to 2025.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, citing government data, said manufacturing’s share of GDP fell to 12.83 per cent in 2023 from 15.25 per cent a decade earlier. His assessment is politically contested, but the underlying issue is also visible in the programme’s own performance gap: strong output and export gains in selected sectors have not produced a manufacturing expansion large enough to meet the headline target.
The employment data presents an even sharper problem. The share of the workforce employed in manufacturing declined from 12.6 per cent in 2011-12 to 10.9 per cent in 2020-21, before recovering slightly to 11.6 per cent the following year. That trajectory is distant from the earlier promise of creating 100 million new manufacturing jobs.
This is not simply a question of whether factories are producing more. It is a question of how production is organised. A manufacturing system focused on final assembly can record substantial increases in output and exports without creating the same depth of domestic employment, supplier activity and technical capability as a system with strong backward integration. The report’s industry sources make this distinction directly.
Aditya Khemka, managing director of CP PLUS, said the next phase should move beyond assembly towards deeper backward integration, domestic research and development and technology designed in India. Rajeev Singh of BenQ India similarly called for greater local engineering, innovation and value creation rather than only higher localisation percentages. Their comments point to a difference between making a product in India and building the industrial ecosystem required to design, supply, improve and export it from India.
That ecosystem includes component manufacturers, specialised material suppliers, tooling firms, testing facilities, logistics providers, repair networks and engineering talent. It also requires smaller companies to obtain finance and enter procurement systems on terms that allow them to scale. Without these layers, large factories may remain dependent on imported components or a narrow group of global firms, limiting the wider economic effect of production growth.
Foreign investment has increased substantially during the period under review. India attracted cumulative FDI of $843 billion between 2014-15 and 2025-26, a 169 per cent increase over the preceding twelve years. The report also records a new annual high of $94.53 billion in 2025-26. This is evidence of greater investor interest, but FDI inflows alone do not show how much domestic capability has been created or how evenly the resulting activity is distributed across regions and firms.
The same qualification applies to the startup economy. More than 2.23 lakh startups had been recognised by March 2026, with over 23.36 lakh jobs created. A record 55,200 startups were added in 2025-26, while almost half of the recognised startups were reported to come from Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns. These figures indicate a wider entrepreneurial base, but the report does not establish how many of these firms are manufacturing companies, how many operate in technology services or how many have reached the scale needed to become industrial suppliers.
That distinction is significant for cities. Startup recognition and electronics production can expand opportunities beyond the largest metros, but manufacturing-led urbanisation depends on more than enterprise numbers. It requires reliable infrastructure, industrial land, power, transport links, worker housing and municipal services. The report does not provide a city-level breakdown of these outcomes, so it cannot establish whether Make in India has produced a geographically broad industrial revival or concentrated gains in a limited number of locations.
The policy design has also created an implementation question. The Production Linked Incentive scheme has demonstrated that financial incentives can attract investment and raise production in targeted industries. Yet the report cites concerns that too many sectors were pursued at once, that the programme remains heavily dependent on global demand and foreign capital, and that implementation has not always matched policy ambition.
These concerns do not cancel the electronics achievement. They identify the point at which the next phase must be judged. The test is no longer only whether India can assemble more devices or report higher exports. It is whether companies based in India can develop more components, own more technology, deepen supplier networks and sustain production when global demand or investment conditions change.
Industry representatives have identified finance as one of the most immediate constraints. Rahul Garg of Moglix called for timely and accessible finance for startups and MSMEs, faster access to markets and procurement, and a stronger focus on execution. This is an institutional issue as much as a business issue. Large manufacturers can respond to incentives, but the industrial base becomes more resilient when smaller firms can obtain working capital, win contracts and invest in machinery and skills.
The evidence therefore presents Make in India as a partial but important transformation. Electronics production, mobile phone manufacturing, exports, FDI and startup recognition have all expanded substantially. At the same time, the manufacturing share of GDP remains below the stated ambition, manufacturing employment has not risen in line with the jobs promise, and the data cited in the report does not show a broad-based acceleration beyond the strongest sectors.
What deserves monitoring next is the quality of localisation rather than only its volume. The key indicators will be domestic component production, research and development, engineering capability, MSME access to finance and procurement, and the spread of industrial activity beyond established centres. The first twelve years show that policy can create production momentum. The unresolved question is whether that momentum can become a deeper, more employment-intensive and geographically distributed manufacturing system.
