India's electronics manufacturing story is no longer just about assembling handsets — it is about building the parts inside them. In a thread posted on Friday, 25 September 2026, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw highlighted that domestic production has expanded well beyond batteries to cover cameras, displays, speakers, coils, enclosures, PCBs, and connectors. The post, labelled as slide 7/ in a continuing thread, stated: 'And it doesn't stop with batteries. Cameras, displays, speakers, coils, enclosures, PCBs, connectors — more of these are being made in India too.' The message signals a deliberate push to move up the electronics value chain rather than remain a destination purely for final assembly.

From Assembly Line to Component Ecosystem

For years, the knock on India's mobile-manufacturing boom was that it was 'screwdriver economics' — finished phones rolled off Indian lines, but virtually every critical part was imported, mostly from East Asia. The components Vaishnaw lists represent exactly the high-value, high-complexity parts that critics pointed to as missing. Displays and camera modules alone account for a significant share of a smartphone's bill of materials; PCBs are the nervous system of every consumer electronic device. The policy architecture behind this shift has two main pillars. The Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme, launched in 2020, extended financial incentives not just to finished mobile phones but to IT hardware and, in successive iterations, to components including batteries, displays, and PCBs. The older Make in India programme, announced in 2014, set the directional goal of reducing import dependence in electronics — a goal that is now being pursued component by component.

Why the Component Layer Matters

Building a domestic component ecosystem changes the economics of electronics manufacturing fundamentally. It compresses lead times, cushions supply-chain shocks, and — critically — retains a far larger share of value addition inside India. Global supply-chain diversification trends, accelerated by disruptions over the last several years, have given India a strategic opening to attract investment in exactly these mid-stream manufacturing layers. The broader pattern is one of deliberate sequencing: draw global assemblers in first, then use that anchor demand to justify component factories, then deepen the cluster until the supply chain is largely self-reinforcing. India is, by Vaishnaw's account, now in that middle phase — components are arriving. The next test will be whether fresh investment commitments materialise in component manufacturing clusters, and whether the upcoming PLI review for IT hardware extends or deepens incentives for the parts named in the minister's post. The assembly story took a decade to tell; the components chapter is only beginning.