Electronic Components PLI

Imagine a laptop being assembled in India from a printed circuit board, a battery, a display and dozens of other components, and discovering that even though the final assembly happens domestically, nearly every single one of those individual components still has to be imported, meaning the laptop is only 'Made in India' in the loosest possible sense, final assembly rather than genuine domestic value addition. That gap is exactly what the Electronic Components PLI scheme was built to close.

Approved by the Union Cabinet in April 2025 with a Rs 22,919 crore outlay, this scheme deliberately targets the layer beneath finished products like laptops, foundational components and sub-assemblies, printed circuit boards and lithium-ion cells prominently among them, the genuinely unglamorous but essential building blocks that determine whether India's electronics manufacturing is real manufacturing or just import-and-assemble relabelling.

This scheme works as a deliberate complement to PLI IT Hardware 2.0 covered elsewhere on this site, rather than only incentivising laptop assembly itself, it incentivises the domestic component supply chain that assembly increasingly needs to draw from, precisely the kind of backward integration, a concept covered generally under Manufacturing on this site, that turns assembly-stage manufacturing into a genuinely deep, harder-to-relocate domestic industry.

Watching how much of a 'Made in India' laptop's component value actually originates domestically, not just where final assembly happens, is the real test of whether this scheme succeeds, if PCB and battery cell sourcing genuinely shifts toward Indian suppliers over the coming years, that's evidence of a maturing domestic electronics ecosystem, if assembly plants keep importing nearly every component regardless, the PLI incentive will have subsidised assembly without building the deeper industry it was designed to create.