S Krishnan, secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has highlighted the tremendous impact of Make in India (MII) initiative on India’s electronics sector, emphasising that electronics has emerged as one of the most impactful sectors.
Krishnan mentioned that the overall production of electronics in India at beginning of 2014 -2015, was 1.9 trillion and it has reached 9.52 trillion today, with a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.4 per cent, significantly faster than other sectors of economy. Exports from India in electronics manufacturing sector have also risen substantially from about Rs 382.63 billion ($ 5.7 billion) in 2014-2015 to Rs 2.41 trillion ($ 29.1 billion) at CAGR of 22.7 per cent. This is also significantly faster than the growth of other export sectors.
He further highlighted that MII’s achievement really is in a sense premised on electronics sector and one of the big elements of electronics sector has been the mobile phones. As per him, in 2014 -2015, only 26 per cent mobile phones which were being sold in India were made in India, the rest were being imported. Today, 99.2 per cent of all mobile phones which are sold in India are made in India. He added, “We are manufacturing between 325 to 330 million mobile phones a year in India and on an average, there are about a billion mobile phones in use in India. We have virtually saturated the domestic market and that is why you see that there is a substantial uptick in the exports of mobile phones.”
He stated that the mobile phone export was about Rs 1.2 trillion in 2023-2024 and the exports have increased 77 times from about Rs 15.66 billion in 2014-2015.
He further mentioned that the overall production target has been exceeded, and has reached Rs 6.661 trillion as total value of production and investment of Rs 91 billion, which is well above the investment. The total employment achieved has been 122,613, which is as per the original target of the scheme.
In addition, the minister highlighted that setting up a semiconductor manufacturing base in India has been the other big part of MII, which the country has been attempting to achieve for over six decades. With the launch of India Semiconductor Mission and five major projects which have been approved, starting with Micron, two projects by Tata Electronics, one project by CG Power, and last project by Kaynes, a real manufacturing base of semiconductors is being established in India.
