India is positioning its electronics sector as the country’s next major export growth engine, with policymakers and industry executives saying that a combination of free trade agreements, manufacturing incentives and rising investor confidence is accelerating the shift toward high-value production.
Sector leaders say the transformation underway is far more structural than previous export surges. “The ongoing FTAs with the EU, ASEAN and Latin America will expand the market for us,” said Shiva Srinivasan, Managing Director of MEL Systems & Services Ltd, noting that negotiations are directly influencing long-term investment decisions.
He added that government spending on semiconductor parks, logistics upgrades and electronics clusters is helping create a manufacturing backbone capable of competing globally.
India used about 585,000 tonnes of aluminium in its electronics industry. — highlighting the scale of the sector’s consumption base — while electronics exports themselves are rapidly climbing. Srinivasan expects outbound shipments to jump to USD 120 billion by March 2026, sharply higher than USD 38 billion the year before, with a far more ambitious target ahead: “I think the target by 2030 is to be USD 500 billion.”
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This can be backed up by data, domestic electronics production has expanded six-fold in a decade to INR 11.3 trillion (USD 123 billion), while exports have grown eight times to INR 3.27 billion (USD 33.7 million) since 2014–15.
At the same time, he acknowledged that the industry continues to grapple with high logistics and compliance costs compared with China, Vietnam and Mexico, along with dependence on imported rare earth minerals.
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Gurmeet Singh, Executive Director of the Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council (ESC), said the sector is entering a “defining phase” as India shifts away from assembly-led operations to deeper value addition. According to him, government incentives have “turned heads toward manufacturing in the Indian electronics industry,” while fresh FTAs—such as the India-UK agreement—and new mutual recognition frameworks are helping broaden access to global markets.
The policy push is being backed by new investment commitments. The government has approved 17 new projects under the Electronics Component Manufacturing Scheme (ECMS), involving INR 71.72 billion (USD 799 million) in investments and expected to create more than 11,800 jobs. Spread across nine states, the projects cover components such as camera modules, multi-layer PCBs, optical transceivers, oscillators and enclosures. With this second tranche, a total of 24 projects have now been sanctioned under the scheme.
The goal, according to the government, is to deepen local production, expand MSME participation and firmly embed India into global electronics supply networks.
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