Examine how production/manufacturing-linked incentive schemes for mobile phones have transformed India's electronics manufacturing landscape. Do they adequately address the shift from assembly to indigenous design?

Launched in 2020, the PLI Scheme for Large Scale Electronics Manufacturing (LSEM) made mobile phones the flagship of Make in India. Its successor, the ₹62,500 crore Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme (MPMS) approved in July 2026, signals that scale has been achieved but design sovereignty remains work in progress.

How the schemes transformed the landscape

• Production scale-up: mobile phone output rose from ₹2.14 lakh crore in FY 2019-20 to ₹5.5 lakh crore in FY 2024-25, with 32 approved beneficiary companies and over 300 manufacturing units operational [1].
• Export turnaround: exports grew roughly eight-fold to about ₹2 lakh crore, converting India from a net importer in 2014 to a net exporter; smartphones emerged as the top exported commodity in 2025 [2].
• Global standing: India is now the world's second-largest mobile manufacturer, with the sector supporting around 12 lakh direct and indirect jobs [1].
• Ecosystem deepening: the Electronics Components Manufacturing Scheme (₹22,919 crore, 2025) extends incentives upstream to components, addressing the thin supplier base [3].

The assembly-to-design gap

• Value addition remains shallow: domestic value addition in electronics is only about 18–20%, indicating that high-value chips, displays and camera modules are still largely imported [1].
• IP deficit: incentives were sales-linked, rewarding volume assembly rather than patents, chip design or brand ownership; Indian handset brands hold a small market share.
• Corrective steps are recent: MPMS grants an extra 1.5% for domestic sourcing and 3% for design and R&D, explicitly targeting Indian brands and patents [4]; India Semiconductor Mission 2.0 seeks full-stack Indian semiconductor IP and domestic equipment and materials [5].

The schemes have decisively transformed India into a global assembly and export hub, but the design transition is only now being incentivised rather than accomplished. Sustaining it requires deeper component localisation, semiconductor-electronics convergence and industry-academia R&D capacity, so that Atmanirbhar Bharat in electronics rests on Indian intellectual property, not merely Indian factory floors.