Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Friday, 25 September 2026 marked the 12th anniversary of Make in India with a sweeping account of the initiative's journey — from a 2014 bet on Indian manufacturing to a programme now logging record foreign investment and export figures that few imagined possible when the scheme was born.

From import dependence to a USD 94.53 billion FDI year

The headline number that anchors Goyal's assessment: India recorded its highest-ever annual FDI inflow of USD 94.53 billion in FY 2025-26. Cumulative foreign direct investment from FY 2014-15 through FY 2025-26 has now crossed USD 843 billion. Those figures are not a coincidence — they mark twelve years of compounding policy choices made after Prime Minister Narendra Modi formally launched Make in India on 25 September 2014, staking his first term's economic identity on the proposition that India could become a global factory floor.

Goyal frames the 2014 starting point starkly: a country where 'many products used in India were imported' and where scepticism about domestic manufacturing capacity was mainstream. Modi, he writes, 'refused to accept that as our fate.' That refusal translated into a twelve-year reform sequence — FDI liberalisation, Ease of Doing Business overhauls, industrial corridor construction and, from 2020 onwards, the targeted muscle of Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes.

PLI scoreboard: ₹2.40 lakh crore invested, 14.6 lakh jobs created

The PLI numbers Goyal cites as of 31 March 2026 are striking. The schemes have drawn ₹2.40 lakh crore in actual investment, generated ₹23.8 lakh crore in production and sales, and powered ₹15.2 lakh crore in exports. More than 14.6 lakh direct and indirect jobs have been created across beneficiary sectors.

Those sectors span the breadth of modern industry: electronics and telecom, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, automobiles, IT hardware, and speciality steel. The spread is deliberate — PLI was designed not as a single-sector subsidy but as a rolling incentive architecture that follows wherever India's comparative advantage can be sharpened. Electronics, once almost entirely imported, now leaves Indian ports at scale. Pharmaceuticals, already a global generics leader before 2014, have deepened that lead.

Greenfield corridors and the ONDC retail revolution

Manufacturing at scale needs land, power, logistics and connectivity before it needs subsidies. That is the logic behind the National Industrial Corridor Development Programme, which is building greenfield industrial smart cities across India to create infrastructure designed for globally competitive production from day one — not retrofitted around legacy constraints.

At the other end of the size spectrum sits the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), the government-backed open protocol that is doing for small-business e-commerce what UPI did for payments. Goyal notes that over 470 crore orders have been placed through the platform — a figure that signals ONDC has moved decisively past pilot stage into mass adoption. For a Make in India narrative that risks being dominated by heavy industry, ONDC is the proof that the programme's ambition extends to the kirana owner and the cottage artisan.

Viksit Bharat 2047 and the confidence argument

Goyal's post closes on something harder to quantify than FDI or PLI exports: confidence. He argues that Make in India's deepest legacy is 'the confidence among our startup founders, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, innovators, exporters and, most importantly, our people that India can make, India can innovate, and India can compete with the world.'

That confidence now has an explicit destination — Viksit Bharat 2047, the long-term national vision for India to become a developed economy by the centenary of its independence. Making India a 'global manufacturing powerhouse' is cast not as an end in itself but as the structural foundation that turns the 2047 ambition from slogan into arithmetic. Twelve years in, the programme has the numbers to argue the foundation is real. The next twelve will test whether those numbers compound.