It’s been almost four years since the launch of Modi government’s flagship scheme - Make in India. The 'Make in India' initiative was launched with an aim to promote India as an investment destination and a global hub for manufacturing.

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The scheme aims to boost the manufacturing sector in India by enhancing existing India based manufacturing companies and also by attracting investments from other countries by inviting global manufacturing companies to ‘make in India’.

It targets to increase the share of manufacturing sector in the country's gross domestic product (GDP) to 25% by 2022 and also aims to create 100 million additional jobs by 2022 in the manufacturing sector alone. However, the scheme hasn’t been able to boost up the share of the manufacturing industry.

The percentage of the manufacturing industry in India’s GDP has come down to 15 percent in 2017, according to World Bank data. The manufacturing industry in India had a 17.4 percent in country’s overall GDP in 2006.

However, when the scheme was launched in September 2014, the share of manufacturing in GDP did rise marginally from 15.06 percent in 2014 to 15.4 percent in 2015 but has continuously been falling since then.

Another data point which measures manufacturing growth is Index of industrial production (IIP). While manufacturing GDP measures the value of the goods produced, IIP measures the change in total output. India’s IIP data also does not portray an encouraging trend. The manufacturing IIP grew at 3 percent during 2015-16, and the growth increased to 4.9 percent in 2016-17 but again fell to 4.5 percent in the last fiscal. Even if we look at the monthly IIP growth in the manufacturing sector, it marginally picked up for a brief period, after the launch of the scheme, but has been on a falling trajectory since last few months.

However, there has been an improvement in India’s ease of doing business ranking. India improved its ranking from #142 in 2014 to #100 in 2018 in World Bank’s Doing Business index.

India has also been successful in attracting various companies to manufacture in India. For instance, Alstom has commenced production in its E-loco plant at Madhepura (Bihar) and is also setting up maintenance depots at Saharanpur (Uttar Pradesh) and Nagpur (Maharashtra). Boeing Co. in collaboration with India’s Tata Aerospace Ltd has recently inaugurated its facility to produce fuselages for the AH-64 Apache helicopter in Hyderabad. Boeing Co. has another partnership with India’s HAL and Mahindra Defence to manufacture F/A-18 Fighter Jets in India.

In telecom, Gionee and Xiaomi (China) are already making their handsets at Foxconn plant in Andhra Pradesh, and Apple is about to start manufacturing iPhones in Bengaluru.

First Published:Jul 24, 2018 6:55 AM IST