Twelve years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood in New Delhi and dared India to stop being the world's marketplace and start being its factory, Rajasthan Chief Minister Bhajan Lal Sharma marked the anniversary with a pointed reminder of how far that ambition has travelled. Posting on 25 September 2026 — exactly 12 years to the day since the initiative's launch — CM Sharma wrote in Hindi: 'Kabhi Bharat ne sapna dekha tha ki woh keval duniya ka baazaar nahin, balki duniya ki nirmaan shakti bane.' ('Once India dreamed of becoming not just the world's market, but the world's manufacturing power.') He credited PM Modi's 'visionary leadership' for moving that dream from resolve to achievement, and listed electronics, defence, semiconductors, automobiles, UPI, and railways as sectors where the 'Made in India' echo now resonates globally.

A programme born from a single ambition

Make in India was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 25 September 2014 with a straightforward proposition: raise manufacturing's share in India's GDP, attract foreign direct investment, and build the domestic supply chains that would make the country genuinely self-reliant — not just in rhetoric but in output. The lion-emblem logo, designed to project industrial strength, quickly became one of the most recognised symbols of the government's economic identity. The initiative did not arrive in isolation. It became the trunk from which a family of manufacturing-support policies branched out: Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes in 14 sectors, including mobile electronics, defence components, and pharmaceuticals, were explicitly designed to translate Make in India's ambitions into plant-level investment decisions. The semiconductor mission, which India has pursued with growing urgency given global supply-chain disruptions, sits directly in that lineage.

Rajasthan's stake in India's manufacturing story

CM Sharma's tribute is not merely ceremonial. Rajasthan has been positioning itself as a destination for defence manufacturing, renewable energy equipment, and electronics assembly — all sectors that the Make in India framework has prioritised with policy incentives and streamlined approvals. State governments across India have competed to attract the FDI and PLI-linked projects that the central programme unlocks, and Sharma's post signals Rajasthan's continued alignment with that national-level push. The mention of UPI alongside physical manufacturing sectors is deliberate and revealing. Make in India's evolution has come to encompass digital infrastructure — India's homegrown payments stack has become one of the country's most visible exports of technological credibility, adopted or studied by dozens of countries. Lumping UPI with semiconductors and railways signals that 'manufacturing power' is now understood to include the engineering of systems, not just of goods.

Twelve years on: what the milestone means

A twelve-year anniversary in policy terms is a moment of genuine reckoning. Programmes launched with fanfare often fade within a budget cycle or two; Make in India has survived three general elections, a global pandemic that scrambled every supply chain on earth, and a geopolitical realignment that has made 'friend-shoring' a boardroom priority worldwide. That durability is itself a data point. The sectors CM Sharma cites — especially defence and semiconductors — reflect where India's manufacturing story is most consequential and most contested. India has moved from near-total import dependence in defence hardware toward a stated goal of 70 percent domestic procurement, with several platforms now being produced domestically. The semiconductor ambition is newer and more fragile, but the policy scaffolding is in place. The world's growing trust in products made and innovations developed in India, as Sharma frames it, is a source of pride for every Indian — and a benchmark the next twelve years will be measured against.