by ECMS Programme Moves India’s Semiconductor and Electronics Ambitions From Policy Document to Something Resembling Reality
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
NEW DELHI, INDIA — The Electronics Component Manufacturing Scheme, India’s policy initiative to develop a domestic electronics component manufacturing ecosystem, has approved 75 projects worth Rs 61,000 crore (approximately $7.3 billion USD), representing the most concrete step yet in India’s attempt to move from electronics assembly to electronics component production and to compete in the supply chain positions that China has dominated for three decades.
The Manufacturing Vision and the Supply Chain Reality
India’s electronics manufacturing story of the past decade has been one of successful assembly — particularly iPhone final assembly, where Apple has expanded its India manufacturing presence significantly — and limited success in component manufacturing, where the supply chain depth that makes China competitive requires ecosystems of specialized suppliers that take decades to develop. The ECMS programme is specifically designed to address this gap: incentivizing investment in the components that India currently imports from China, Taiwan, and South Korea to assemble into finished devices.
The 75 approved projects span a range of component categories: printed circuit boards, passive components, mechanical components, and display modules among the priorities. Each represents an attempt to build manufacturing capability that, aggregated across the programme, would give India something approaching a self-sufficient electronics supply chain. Whether the approved projects translate into operating factories producing components at competitive cost and quality is the implementation question that policy announcements do not answer.
The China Comparison and Its Complications
Competing with China’s electronics manufacturing ecosystem is a long-term project that India’s planners are undertaking with honest acknowledgment of the gap. China’s electronics manufacturing depth — the clusters of specialized suppliers in Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Wuhan that can source any component within hours — developed through decades of investment, infrastructure development, and the specific policy environment that prioritized manufacturing as a national strategic goal.
India’s advantages in this competition include its English-language proficiency (relevant for software-intensive manufacturing), its younger demographic profile, its lower labor costs relative to China’s current levels, and the genuine interest from global corporations seeking to diversify supply chains away from single-country concentration. Apple’s India expansion is the most visible expression of this interest, and the ECMS programme is designed to deepen it by building the component supply that makes India more than just the final assembly location for devices that are 90 percent manufactured elsewhere.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT has positioned ECMS as a cornerstone of India’s Semicon India programme, which aims to build a semiconductor ecosystem alongside the electronics component ecosystem. The two programmes are complementary: component manufacturing capability supports semiconductor design and fabrication ambitions, and semiconductor availability reduces the supply chain vulnerability that makes electronics manufacturing in India currently dependent on imports.
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The Semiconductor Ambition: What India Is Building Toward
India’s semiconductor ambition — producing chips domestically rather than importing them from Taiwan and South Korea — is a longer-term project than the ECMS programme’s component manufacturing focus, but the two are related. Component manufacturing capability builds the supply chain depth that semiconductor fabrication requires. India’s first semiconductor fabrication plant, being developed by Tata Electronics in partnership with Powerchip Semiconductor, represents the most concrete step toward domestic chip production. Whether India can develop a competitive semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem is a question that will be answered over a decade rather than a year, and the ECMS programme’s success in building component manufacturing is one of the leading indicators that will shape that answer. The comparison with China’s semiconductor development journey — from assembly to components to full fabrication over forty years — provides a realistic timeline that Indian planners are using as a benchmark while hoping their own trajectory is faster given the lessons available from observing China’s development.
The PLI (Production Linked Incentive) schemes that precede ECMS have produced measurable results in mobile phone manufacturing: India went from negligible mobile phone exports in 2019 to over $15 billion in 2025-26, with Apple’s India-manufactured iPhones representing the highest-profile component. The PLI model — cash incentives for incremental production above threshold baselines — proved effective for assembly operations where the production scaling is more linear. The ECMS extension to components faces a more complex production function where quality consistency and process technology maturation create longer timelines before incentive programs produce competitive output.
The specific geography of India’s electronics manufacturing clusters — concentrated in Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and portions of Karnataka — reflects infrastructure availability, state government policy support, and labor force characteristics that these states have invested in building. The ECMS programme’s project approvals are distributed across these existing clusters while also encouraging new cluster development in states that have shown policy commitment to manufacturing attraction. The geographic distribution of electronics manufacturing is itself a form of federal economic development, distributing the benefits of manufacturing growth beyond the states that were early movers.
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The foreign investment in India’s electronics sector that the ECMS programme seeks to attract will require infrastructure beyond financial incentives: reliable power supply, logistics connectivity, a skilled workforce pipeline, and the regulatory environment that foreign manufacturers require to commit to production at scale in India. These enabling conditions are the subject of state government competition: Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and other states compete to provide the best enabling environment for electronics investment, creating a productive federalism dynamic where the central scheme creates the demand for state-level competition.
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