India’s electronics push accelerates

India’s electronics policy is no longer just about making more phones. It is moving down the supply chain, into the parts inside them, and outward into the infrastructure that will run the software economy those devices feed. In the past week, New Delhi approved 29 more proposals under its Electronics Component Manufacturing Scheme, adding ₹7,104 crore in planned investment and 14,246 projected jobs. That follows an earlier batch of 46 approvals worth ₹54,567 crore, part of a national program meant to pull component production into India instead of importing it. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) That shift matters because India’s electronics boom has been real, but incomplete. The country got very good at final assembly, especially in smartphones. It did not build the same depth in displays, camera modules, printed circuit boards, passive components, enclosures, and other parts that make assembly possible. The scheme approved last year was designed to attack exactly that weakness. It offers different incentives for sub-assemblies, bare components, and manufacturing equipment, with the goal of raising domestic value addition and plugging Indian firms into global supply chains rather than leaving them as the last stop on the line. (pib.gov.in) The scale of the ambition is easy to miss if you only look at one approval round. The scheme was originally cleared with a ₹22,919 crore outlay and a target of attracting ₹59,350 crore in investment, generating ₹4,56,500 crore in output, and creating 91,600 direct jobs. Then the government raised the outlay to ₹40,000 crore in the 2026–27 budget after commitments under the program surged. This is not a pilot anymore. It is becoming the industrial policy spine of India’s electronics sector. (pib.gov.in) The backdrop is a decade of rapid growth. India’s electronics production rose from ₹1.9 lakh crore in 2014–15 to ₹11.3 lakh crore in 2024–25, while exports climbed from ₹38,000 crore to ₹3.27 lakh crore over the same period. Electronics are now one of India’s fastest-growing export categories, and the government wants the sector to reach $500 billion by 2030–31. Those numbers explain why the state is now obsessing over components. Once assembly scales, imported parts become the bottleneck. (static.pib.gov.in) That is also why market access is getting harder for some Chinese products. From April 1, India began enforcing tougher certification rules for internet-connected CCTV equipment, a move that has effectively blocked major Chinese vendors such as Hikvision and Dahua from selling new products in the country unless they clear the new regime. The rule is framed as a security measure, but it also creates room for domestic and non-Chinese suppliers in a fast-growing market. In India now, industrial policy and security policy are increasingly the same thing. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) The other half of the story sits on the demand side. Google is reported to begin its $15 billion data-centre project near Visakhapatnam on April 28, through its subsidiary Raiden Infotech India. The plan covers three campuses at Adavivaram, Tarluvada, and Rambilli, with land already handed over by the Andhra Pradesh government. Multiple reports describe it as the largest single foreign direct investment in India and put the combined capacity at about one gigawatt. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) That project does not make chips. It does something just as important for this moment. It signals that India is not only trying to manufacture more hardware, but also to absorb far more compute, storage, and AI infrastructure at home. A country that wants local electronics capacity needs local buyers for servers, power systems, cooling equipment, networking gear, and the long chain of services around them. Visakhapatnam is becoming a concrete expression of that logic, spread across more than 600 acres near the Bay of Bengal. (communicationstoday.co.in)