New Delhi, India – Twelve years on from the launch of the Make in India campaign on September 25, 2014, a look at 12 metrics spanning growth, investment, employment, and exports shows that the manufacturing sector’s share in India’s economic growth, employment, and global exports has remained largely the same since then. While recent incentive schemes by the government have seen some success, those gains are limited to a handful of sectors.
While launching the campaign, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that “industrialists don’t come due to some fancy incentive scheme” but instead need a “development and growth-oriented environment.” The data over the last 12 years show that while the government’s incentive schemes are the ones that have met some success, other metrics that reflect a “development and growth-oriented environment” are underperforming.
The manufacturing sector has grown faster than the overall economy in only five of the 12 years under consideration, based on the old series. The Index of Industrial Production data is more stark, with the manufacturing sector outpacing the overall index’s growth in only three out of the 12 years. As far as the composition of the economy goes, the older series of Gross Value Added (GVA) data shows the manufacturing sector’s share in overall GVA is lower in 2025-26 than it was when Make in India was launched in 2014.
India saw the value of its non-petroleum goods exports grow 53% to $388.3 billion in 2025-26 from $253.5 billion in 2014, but UNCTAD data shows India’s share in global merchandise exports grew from around 0.8% in 2002 to 1.7% in 2013, where it remained even in 2025-26. The gross fixed capital formation by the private sector formed a lower share of GDP in 2023-24 than it did in 2014-15, and FDI to the manufacturing sector grew slower than overall FDI in seven of the 12 years. The RBI’s data on capacity utilisation shows the metric is still below the 80% mark that is considered the limit after which companies invest to create new capacity.
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The government’s Production-Linked Incentive schemes have yielded some results, with investments exceeding ₹2.16 lakh crore and employment generation of over 14.39 lakh, but those gains sit in a handful of sectors rather than across manufacturing as a whole. The contested point is whether the shortfall reflects too few incentives or a failure of private investment to broaden beyond the sectors an incentive already reaches.
