Twelve years after Make in India was launched with the ambition of turning the country into a global manufacturing hub, the initiative has produced a clear but uneven result. India has built significant production capacity in electronics, attracted large foreign investment and expanded its startup base. Yet the two outcomes that would most directly reshape the urban economy—manufacturing’s weight in national output and the number of stable jobs it creates—remain well below the original promise.
That contrast matters because manufacturing is not only an industrial policy question. It affects how cities grow, where workers migrate, whether smaller towns develop durable economic bases and whether infrastructure investment produces productive employment rather than only construction activity. The evidence in the 12-year review suggests that Make in India has been more successful at building selected export-oriented capabilities than at creating a broad manufacturing ecosystem across sectors and regions.
The strongest gains are concentrated in electronics. Electronics production rose from about Rs 1.9 lakh crore in 2014-15 to nearly Rs 13.11 lakh crore in 2025-26. Mobile phone production increased from roughly Rs 18,000 crore to Rs 6.27 lakh crore over the same period. This represents a major change in India’s position in the global electronics chain. The country moved from importing most of the phones used domestically to producing nearly all of them within India.
The Production Linked Incentive scheme has been central to that shift. By March 2026, the scheme had attracted approximately Rs 2.40 lakh crore in actual investment, generated around Rs 23.8 lakh crore in production and sales, supported exports worth about Rs 15.2 lakh crore and created more than 14.6 lakh direct and indirect jobs, according to the figures cited in the report. These numbers show that targeted incentives can accelerate capacity creation when they are linked to sectors with large and expanding global markets.
However, the electronics story also illustrates the limits of measuring industrial success through output alone. Industry representatives cited in the report argue that India must move beyond assembly towards deeper backward integration, local engineering, research and development, and products designed domestically. Aditya Khemka, managing director of CP PLUS, said the next phase should involve more homegrown technology and deeper integration. Rajeev Singh of BenQ India similarly called for greater local engineering, innovation and value creation rather than only higher localisation percentages.
The distinction between assembly and a complete manufacturing ecosystem is significant for cities. Assembly plants can generate investment and employment, but a deeper industrial base also requires component suppliers, testing facilities, logistics networks, specialised industrial land, technical training institutions and reliable access to finance. These activities create more linkages across an urban region. Without them, production can remain concentrated in a limited number of large facilities while much of the value—design, intellectual property, advanced components and high-end services—continues to be generated elsewhere.
Foreign investment has also grown strongly. India attracted cumulative FDI of $843 billion between 2014-15 and 2025-26, a 169 per cent increase over the preceding twelve-year period. FDI reached a record $94.53 billion in 2025-26. This indicates that international companies have become more willing to view India as a production and investment destination. But the figures do not by themselves establish how much of that capital created labour-intensive manufacturing, how widely it was distributed across states or how much domestic supplier capacity it generated.
The report’s central tension appears in the manufacturing sector’s share of GDP. Make in India originally set a target of raising manufacturing to 25 per cent of GDP by 2022, a goal later extended to 2025. That target was not achieved. The sector’s share has remained in the range of 13 to 17 per cent, while Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge cited a fall to 12.83 per cent in 2023 from 15.25 per cent a decade earlier. These figures are politically contested in their interpretation, but they point to the same broad issue: growth in selected manufacturing segments has not translated into a structural transformation of the economy.
Employment data makes the gap more difficult to dismiss. 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 remains far from the earlier promise of 100 million new manufacturing jobs. Jairam Ramesh, Congress general secretary, argued that the expected private investment boom and broad-based job creation had not materialised. His assessment also questioned whether manufacturing growth, measured through gross value added and the Index of Industrial Production, had generally outpaced overall economic growth.
The employment shortfall has a direct urban dimension. Manufacturing has historically helped cities absorb workers with different levels of education and skill. Large factories, supplier networks, warehouses, transport services and worker housing can create a ladder of employment that is broader than the formal workforce of a single company. When industrial growth is concentrated in capital-intensive or highly automated facilities, that ladder becomes narrower. Cities may still receive migrants and experience land and infrastructure pressure without gaining a comparable volume of stable jobs.
The startup figures show another side of the economic transition. 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, and nearly half of the recognised startups are reported to come from Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns. This spread is important because it suggests that enterprise creation is no longer confined to India’s largest metropolitan regions. Yet startup recognition is not the same as sustained scale, and the supplied evidence does not establish how many of these firms have entered manufacturing, how many have survived or how many jobs are formal and long-term.
That uncertainty brings attention to the role of smaller firms. Rahul Garg of Moglix called for timely and accessible finance for startups and MSMEs, faster market access and better procurement pathways. The demand reflects a structural constraint: large plants can anchor production, but domestic manufacturing depth depends on whether smaller suppliers can invest, meet quality standards, hire workers and survive payment delays. If finance remains expensive or inaccessible, the benefits of incentives may remain concentrated among larger firms.
The policy architecture has therefore delivered its clearest results where the government could identify priority sectors, attach incentives to measurable production and align policy with an expanding global market. Electronics, particularly mobile phones, became the most visible example. But the broader target required more than isolated sectoral success. It required industrial land, logistics, skills, stable regulation, domestic demand, supplier development and financing to work together across many locations.
This is also where implementation becomes more important than announcement. The report notes concerns about too many sectors being pursued at once, dependence on foreign capital and global demand, and weak follow-through. These are not simply questions about the size of subsidies. They concern whether incentives are creating permanent capabilities or only attracting production while conditions are favourable. They also concern whether public policy can coordinate central schemes with state-level land, power, transport, labour and urban planning decisions.
The data confirms that Make in India has changed India’s manufacturing profile in selected areas. Electronics production, mobile phone output, PLI-linked investment and exports have all expanded sharply. FDI and startup recognition have also reached high levels. At the same time, the evidence does not show that manufacturing has reached 25 per cent of GDP or that the initiative has delivered the scale of employment once associated with its launch.
The next phase will be judged less by the number of products assembled in India and more by the depth of domestic value creation. That includes components, design, research, supplier networks, MSME finance and jobs distributed across a wider range of cities and towns. The central urban question is whether industrial policy can build not only factories, but complete economic ecosystems around them. The available evidence shows considerable progress on capacity and confidence, while the conversion of that progress into broad-based manufacturing employment remains unfinished.
