A smartphone is a stack of a dozen technologies — chip, modem, memory, display, camera, battery, board, body, factory, operating system, AI models and a brand. India is world-class at some, absent from others. This tracker scores each layer, names the companies and the money behind them, and lists exactly what still blocks a phone that is Indian all the way down.
“This is 23 October 2026. Please note it: 23 October 2028. You will have Indian-designed, Indian-manufactured, Indian-branded mobile phones.”
— Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Electronics & IT, New Delhi
Every block is one milestone, in rough order of difficulty, from easiest on the left to hardest on the right. Green is done, striped is under way, white is not yet started. Hover or tap a block to see it.
Each bar is how much of that layer is Indian-owned today — design IP, fabrication and control — not merely assembled here. Tap any layer for the companies, the money, the blocker and the realistic stop-gap.
Exploded view — colour = readiness. Click a part.
The phone splits into five domains, then components, then the parts that have to be built. Colour shows where India is today. NEXT marks the next node to unlock on each branch. Click a node to expand or collapse it, and hover for details.
Tip: on a phone, swipe sideways inside the diagram.
An indicative bill of materials for a ₹20,000 AI-capable Android phone. The top bar is what each part costs; the bottom bar shows how much of that value is Indian-owned, merely made in India, or imported. The chip and memory alone are ~40% of the phone — and both are almost entirely imported.
The government's 25–28% domestic value addition counts work done in India — assembly, testing, locally made chargers, enclosures and packaging — regardless of who owns the technology. Our ~18% counts only value from Indian-owned design and production. Both are correct; they answer different questions.
“Indian-designed, Indian-manufactured, Indian-branded” means owning the phone's system design (board, industrial design, software) and the brand, plus building it here. It does not require an Indian processor, modem, memory or OS — which is why it is achievable by 2028 while a fully indigenous phone is not.
The Army's SAMBHAV secure phone and the phones marketed as Indian, rated part by part, alongside foreign phones made in India for comparison. Two scores: hardware, weighted by how much each part costs, and software & control, meaning who owns the OS, apps, AI and security. Click a phone for the details.
Ratings are our assessment from public reporting (Indian Army statements, The Week, Business Standard, WION, Medianama, GSMArena, company pages). SAMBHAV's hardware, chipset and OS base have not been officially disclosed. Where a part isn't disclosed it is scored as foreign. Hardware weights follow the bill of materials above.
Ranked by how hard each gap is to close. Severity bars reflect capital needed, time to close and how concentrated the global supply is. Each comes with the realistic interim workaround.
These are the next white blocks on the progress line, ordered by what is closest to reach. For each we list what it takes, which schemes already fund it, and who looks capable of doing it. The candidates are our suggestions based on existing capability, not announced plans.
India has committed well over ₹4 lakh crore across schemes that touch the phone stack. Most of it funds manufacturing and mature-node chips — very little goes to the leading-edge processor, modem and OS layers where the dependence is greatest.
Approved outlays; disbursement is lower and phased.
India Semiconductor Mission projects relevant to electronics. 50% of project cost is central support.
| Chip project | Location | Type | Relevance to a phone | ₹ crore |
|---|
Chip fabs, packaging plants, phone factories, and AI and chip-design hubs across India. Larger circles mean bigger approved investment. Hollow dashed circles are proposed or abandoned projects. Click any site for details.
Outline: Survey of India official boundary (via DataMeet). Positions are approximate to the town.
Thirteen sub-stages, from processor design to AI models. On each row, Indian companies are on the left and global leaders on the right, with bubbles sized by approximate annual revenue. Plants still being built are shown as dotted rings sized by committed investment. The figure at the left of each row is the gap between the biggest global and biggest Indian company. Click any bubble for details.
Approximate revenue for FY2024–25 or calendar 2024/25, whole company (not only the phone business), from public filings and press reports; foreign figures converted at ~₹84/US$. PPP factors use approximate 2024 price levels (World Bank/OECD style): India 0.25, US 1.0, UK 0.86, Japan 0.62, Korea 0.61, China 0.50, Taiwan 0.42. Indian arms of foreign brands show India revenue. *Jio's figure is whole-company telecom revenue, so it isn't a like-for-like AI comparison. Where figures aren't public, a size band is shown instead of a number. Indicative only; verify before citing.
Semicon 1.0 (December 2021) set off India's first organised push to train chip and electronics talent. Today's experienced workforce mostly comes from foreign companies' design centres in India, Indians returning from the global chip industry, and staff trained by foreign partners. The next wave is coming through colleges and new national programmes.
Indicative flows, our assessment, not measured data. Hover a source or destination to highlight its flows.
Figures are from government statements and company announcements; several are targets or pledges, not outcomes. Leader roles are as last reported. Micron India's MD appointment dates from ~2019–20 and may have changed.
Indian-owned firms and the foreign firms building in India. Ownership matters: Samsung's Noida factory is huge, but the IP stays in Korea.
India almost built a chip industry in the 1980s, briefly owned its own phone market in 2014, and lost both. The current push is the largest and best-funded yet.
Our assessment of when each level of “indigenous” becomes realistic, given current projects, funding and global supply chains.
~20–25% Indian-owned value. On track — the government's stated target.
~30–35% Indian-owned value. Plausible if Dholera ramps on time.
~50–60% Indian-owned value. Needs a ₹10,000+ cr, decade-long fabless champion.
No country does this alone — not the US, China or Korea. A goal of “Indian-controlled”, not “100% Indian”, is the realistic target.
Each layer is scored 0–100 for Indian ownership of design IP, fabrication capability and supply control, based on the public record as of 27 October 2026. The headline figure weights each layer by its indicative share of a mid-range phone's bill of materials. Scores and BoM shares are editorial estimates meant to compare layers, not official statistics. Corrections welcome.