India is no longer content just assembling laptops and servers — it wants to build the entire supply chain at home. Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman told the Rajya Sabha on Monday, August 10, 2026 that a fresh push is underway to draw the full electronics manufacturing ecosystem into the country, covering everything from finished devices to the sub-assemblies that go inside them. Speaking in the upper house, Sitharaman listed the items targeted under the initiative: laptops, all-in-one personal computers, tablets, servers, ultra-small form factor (USFF) devices, and critically, sub-assemblies — the components that sit a step before the finished product. 'This is aimed at getting a larger ecosystem into the country, so that specific manufacturing which is now giving good results for India can bring the entire ecosystem to India,' she said.

From assembly floors to upstream suppliers

The distinction between 'finished goods' and 'sub-assemblies' is where the real ambition lives. India's electronics sector has, for years, been criticised for being a screwdriver economy — importing components and merely bolting them together domestically. The inclusion of USFF devices and sub-assemblies in the current push signals a deliberate attempt to move up the value chain, not just count boxes shipped out of Indian factories. This builds directly on the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme for IT Hardware, notified in 2021, which tied financial incentives to incremental domestic production of laptops, tablets and servers. That scheme attracted assembly-level investments; the government now appears to be using its early results as a springboard to pull in upstream component and sub-assembly suppliers.

Make in India's electronics chapter deepens

The broader policy lineage stretches back to the Make in India initiative of 2014, which set the ambition of turning India into a global manufacturing hub. Electronics were always central to that vision, but progress was uneven — mobile phones saw a genuine manufacturing surge, while laptops and servers lagged. Sitharaman's remarks suggest the government believes conditions are now ripe to replicate that mobile-sector success in IT hardware. The strategy — combining incentives for domestic production with pressure on imports — is designed to make it economically rational for global original equipment manufacturers and their supplier networks to set up in India rather than simply ship finished goods in. Servers and USFF devices, increasingly critical to data centres and enterprise IT, add a strategic dimension beyond consumer electronics. If global component makers follow the finished-goods assemblers into India, the country's electronics sector could finally close the gap between 'assembled here' and 'made here' — and that is a very different kind of industrial story.