Make in India Initiative

Make in India was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 25 September 2014 at Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi, as a flagship programme of the Government of India to encourage domestic and foreign firms to manufacture products within the country. The initiative is administered by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. It does not rest on a single enabling statute but operates through executive policy, sectoral Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) reforms under the Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999, amendments to the Companies Act, and a cluster of supporting missions. The programme originally identified 25 focus sectors—including automobiles, defence manufacturing, electronics, pharmaceuticals, textiles, aviation, and renewable energy—and set the headline target of raising the manufacturing share of GDP to 25 percent and creating 100 million jobs by 2022, a horizon later recalibrated.

Procedurally, Make in India advances along four declared pillars: New Processes, New Infrastructure, New Sectors, and New Mindset. The "New Processes" pillar centred on ease of doing business—deregulation, faster clearances, and self-certification—translating into India's climb in the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business index from 142nd in 2014 to 63rd in 2019 before the index was discontinued. The mechanics begin with sectoral liberalisation: the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs and DPIIT raise FDI caps and shift sectors from the government-approval route to the automatic route, where no prior clearance is required. Defence FDI was raised to 49 percent (and to 74 percent under the automatic route in 2020), railways infrastructure opened to 100 percent, and insurance and construction caps were eased. Investors then access single-window clearance portals and the eBiz platform to consolidate licences, registrations, and inspections.

Beyond liberalisation, the initiative operates through interlocking missions and incentive schemes. The Goods and Services Tax, implemented 1 July 2017, unified the indirect-tax market and reduced inter-state friction for manufacturers. The National Industrial Corridor programme—anchored by the Delhi–Mumbai Industrial Corridor—builds plug-and-play industrial townships. The most consequential successor instrument is the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme, introduced in 2020, which disburses cash incentives of 4–6 percent on incremental sales of goods manufactured in India across 14 sectors with an outlay exceeding ₹1.97 lakh crore. Allied programmes—Skill India, Digital India, Startup India, and the Phased Manufacturing Programme for mobile handsets—reinforce the supply of labour, demand, and component depth.

Contemporary results cluster in electronics and defence. Mobile-phone manufacturing expanded from two units in 2014 to over 200 by 2023; Apple's contract manufacturers Foxconn, Wistron, and Pegatron established iPhone assembly in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, with India exporting iPhones worth over US$10 billion in FY2024. The Ministry of Defence issued successive "positive indigenisation lists" barring import of specified items, and the Dassault–Hindustan Aeronautics and Tata–Airbus C-295 facility at Vadodara (foundation laid October 2022) exemplify defence localisation. Vande Bharat trainsets, manufactured by the Integral Coach Factory, Chennai, are routinely cited by the Railway Ministry as Make in India outputs.

Make in India is distinct from, though frequently conflated with, the Atmanirbhar Bharat ("self-reliant India") package announced in May 2020, which is a broader economic-stimulus and self-reliance doctrine encompassing fiscal relief, MSME credit, and import substitution; Make in India is the manufacturing-promotion vehicle nested within that doctrine. It also differs from "Made in India," a country-of-origin label, and from straightforward import substitution, since Make in India explicitly courts export competitiveness and global value-chain integration rather than autarky. The PLI scheme should be read as an outcome-linked subsidy distinct from the earlier input-linked or capital-subsidy regimes it partly replaced.

Controversies attend the programme's headline metrics. The manufacturing share of GDP stagnated near 15–17 percent rather than rising to the targeted 25 percent, and the Periodic Labour Force Survey did not register manufacturing-employment gains commensurate with the 100-million-job pledge. Critics, including parliamentary standing committee reports, noted that several PLI sectors underperformed disbursement targets and that "manufacturing" in electronics often amounted to low-value-added assembly rather than deep component fabrication. The 2025 launch of "Make in India 2.0," covering 27 sectors with sharpened focus on semiconductors (the India Semiconductor Mission and the Dholera and Sanand fabrication plants) and component ecosystems, responds to these critiques. Geopolitically, the "China plus one" supply-chain diversification following the COVID-19 pandemic and US–China trade tensions has supplied external tailwinds the original 2014 design did not anticipate.

For the working practitioner—desk officers, trade negotiators, and analysts—Make in India functions as the organising frame for India's industrial diplomacy and a recurring General Studies Paper II and III theme in the UPSC Civil Services Examination on government schemes and economic development. It conditions bilateral investment treaty negotiations, technology-transfer clauses in defence procurement, and India's posture in trade fora where local-content requirements intersect with WTO subsidy disciplines under the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures. Understanding which sectors sit on the automatic FDI route, which carry PLI incentives, and how indigenisation lists constrain import procurement is now essential to advising firms on market entry and to assessing India's trajectory as a manufacturing alternative within the Indo-Pacific economic order.