Twelve years after its launch, Make in India is no longer just about assembly — it is about ownership of the value chain. Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said exactly that on Friday, 25 September 2026, wrapping up a thread on X with a pointed declaration about where the programme stands and where it is headed. In the eighth post of his thread, Vaishnaw wrote: 'That's the journey of #MakeInIndia — going deeper into the value chain. And the journey ahead is about making even more in India.' The framing was deliberate: not a celebration of where India started, but a forward signal about what the next phase demands.

From Assembly Lines to Value Addition

Make in India was launched in September 2014 with an ambition to transform India into a global manufacturing hub — attracting foreign direct investment, cutting red tape, and kickstarting domestic production across sectors. In its early years, critics and supporters alike noted that much of the activity it generated was screwdriver-assembly: components imported, finished products labelled. The government acknowledged that tension and responded with the Atmanirbhar Bharat package in 2020, which pushed harder on domestic value addition and supply-chain resilience. Vaishnaw's thread appears to narrate that arc — the shift from 'assembled in India' to 'made in India, deep in the stack.' His portfolio — Electronics and Information Technology — sits at the centre of that ambition, particularly as India races to build out semiconductor fabrication, electronics hardware manufacturing, and IT component ecosystems that reduce import dependence.

The Value-Chain Frontier: Electronics, Semis, and Auto Components

The sectors where India has made the most visible push deeper into value chains are electronics, semiconductors, and auto components — all industries where Production Linked Incentive schemes have been the primary policy lever. The PLI architecture rewards companies not just for production volumes but implicitly for building out domestic supply lines. Moving up the value chain means more jobs, higher margins, and less vulnerability to global supply shocks of the kind that exposed every major economy during and after the pandemic. For Indian manufacturers and electronics firms, the minister's signal is worth reading carefully: the government's appetite for deeper localisation is not slowing down. If anything, the framing suggests that the next policy push — whether through PLI disbursements, semiconductor incentives, or a Budget-cycle announcement — will set even more demanding benchmarks for what counts as 'made in India.' The question now is not whether India can assemble. The question is whether it can design, fabricate, and own the stack. Vaishnaw's eight-post thread suggests the government believes the answer is yes — and is prepared to build policy around that bet.