Every year, India imports tens of billions of dollars of electronics — and the single largest source is China. But how much, of what, and where exactly could India make it instead? Is this Make in Opportunity?
This interactive report breaks down India’s entire electronics import bill from China for FY 2025-26, line by line, sized by value and sorted into manufacturing categories — from semiconductors and PCBs to batteries, inverters and LED lighting. Explore it below, filter by sector, and see the biggest “Make in India” opportunities hiding in plain sight.
Since you opened this page, India has imported ₹0 from China.
Ab kya hum yeh bhi nahi bana sakte?
Five things India imports from China by the hundred-million every year — and every single one, we can build right here.
The biggest single prizes
Opportunity sizing
| HS Code | Product | Category | Tier | Import $M ▼ | ₹ Crore |
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Yeh sirf aankde nahi. Ek mauka hai.
A nation that reached Mars on its very first attempt and built the world's largest real-time payments network can make a battery, an inverter, a circuit board. The only question left is whether we choose to build them here.
Every rupee on that counter is a job, a factory, a skill that could be ours. If this stirred something, share it. Tag a founder, an engineer, a policymaker who can act. The first step to building it here is refusing to scroll past it.
Make in India: Decoding India’s Electronics Import Bill from China
India’s journey toward self-reliant manufacturing has a clear, measurable starting point — the goods we still buy from abroad. The interactive report above maps that opportunity in detail, and this section explains what the numbers mean, why they matter, and how the Make in India mission can turn an import bill into a manufacturing roadmap.
Why the import data matters to Make in India
Every product India imports is, in effect, a factory that has not yet been built on Indian soil. When you add up the value of those imports, you are looking at the size of the domestic demand that already exists — demand currently satisfied by manufacturers in other countries. For the Make in India initiative, that is the single most useful signal available: it shows precisely where local demand is large enough to justify building, assembling, and engineering products at home.
In FY 2025-26, India imported goods worth roughly US$131.6 billion from China across nearly 7,900 distinct product lines. Of that total, electronics and electrical goods accounted for about US$58.6 billion — close to 44% of the entire bill. No other category comes close. This concentration is exactly why electronics manufacturing sits at the heart of the Make in India vision and the wider Aatmanirbhar Bharat agenda. If India is to reduce its dependence on imported hardware, the electronics sector is where the largest, fastest wins are waiting.
The report breaks this electronics universe into 996 individual product lines, grouped into 16 manufacturing categories — from semiconductors and integrated circuits to printed circuit boards, lithium-ion batteries, displays, LED lighting, electric motors, power electronics, and the emerging electric-vehicle and drone segments. Each line represents a specific, addressable Make in India opportunity.
What the electronics data reveals
A few categories dominate the import bill, and they tell a clear story about where India’s manufacturing gaps lie.
Telecom, computing and ICs lead the list. Communication equipment and the components inside smartphones, along with laptops and integrated circuits, make up the largest share of electronics imports. These are high-value, technology-intensive categories where deep component ecosystems matter — and where the Make in India programme, supported by Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes, has already begun to shift assembly and, increasingly, component manufacturing into the country.
Batteries are a strategic priority. Lithium-ion cells alone account for roughly US$3.9 billion of imports. These cells power everything from phones to electric vehicles to home inverters. Building a domestic cell-manufacturing base is one of the most consequential goals of the Make in India push, because batteries sit at the intersection of consumer electronics, clean energy, and electric mobility.
Solar matters for energy independence. Photovoltaic cells represent around US$2.4 billion of imports. India’s ambitious renewable-energy targets depend on solar capacity, and localising cell and module manufacturing is central to both energy security and the Make in India agenda.
The “everyday” items are the most striking. Some of the most relatable opportunities are not exotic chips but ordinary products: bare printed circuit boards (around US$721 million), electric motors (around US$875 million), and inverters, rectifiers and chargers (around US$483 million). These are mature technologies that India has manufactured for decades. The fact that so many are still imported underlines how much room there is for domestic suppliers to step in — and how achievable many of these Make in India wins really are.
Reading the report: Electronics Focus and All Industries
The report offers two lenses. The Electronics Focus view is the Make in India opportunity map — it isolates electronics and electricals, organises them into manufacturing categories, and ranks them by import value so you can immediately see the biggest prizes. The All Industries view widens the frame to the complete import bill across 20 industries with nothing excluded, giving context for how dominant electronics is relative to chemicals, base metals, textiles, machinery, and everything else India brings in.
Within either view, you can switch between a proportional treemap, a bar chart, and a pie chart; click any category to filter the data; and open a detailed, searchable table that lets you look up specific products by name or HS code. Import values are shown in both US dollars (millions) and Indian rupees (crore), so the numbers are meaningful whether you think in global or domestic terms.
A key principle runs through the entire analysis: a large import value signals strong existing demand, not automatic feasibility. Whether a given product can be made competitively in India depends on component depth, capital investment, intellectual property, input tariffs, and scale. The report is designed to surface opportunities for the Make in India ecosystem — entrepreneurs, manufacturers, engineers, and policymakers — to evaluate, not to claim that every line is an easy win. The most valuable use of this data is as a starting point for serious feasibility work.
Turning the import bill into a Make in India roadmap
For an Indian hardware founder or manufacturer, this dataset is a shortlist of markets with proven, large-scale demand. For a policymaker, it is a heat map showing where targeted incentives, component clusters, and supply-chain investment could have the greatest impact. For an engineer, it is a catalogue of products waiting to be designed, localised, and improved upon.
The pattern that emerges is encouraging for the Make in India mission. India already has the engineering talent, the growing electronics-design industry, and increasingly the policy support — through PLI schemes across mobiles, IT hardware, telecom equipment, and advanced battery cells — to address these gaps. What this report adds is clarity: a sense of which gaps are largest, which are most concentrated, and which everyday products represent the lowest-hanging fruit.
Localising even a fraction of this import bill would do more than reduce a trade deficit. Each rupee of demand met domestically supports jobs, builds engineering skills, deepens component ecosystems, and strengthens India’s resilience against global supply-chain shocks. That compounding effect — jobs creating skills, skills attracting investment, investment deepening capability — is the real promise of Make in India. It is how a country moves from assembling imported kits to designing and manufacturing complete products, and eventually to exporting them.
A note on the data and methodology
The figures in this report are drawn from the Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics (DGCI&S), Department of Commerce, Government of India, covering imports from China for the financial year 2025-26, reported by value. Products are classified using the Harmonised System (HS) codes that underpin international trade statistics. The “electronics” universe covers HS chapters 84 and 85, along with electronic instruments in chapter 90 and the electric-vehicle, e-mobility and drone segments — while the “All Industries” view groups every chapter into 20 broad industries with no exclusions.
Product descriptions follow the official HS nomenclature, so some lines are catch-all “other” categories that bundle several related goods. Figures are rounded for readability. Because the underlying data is updated periodically, the report reflects the most recent dataset loaded, and the totals above describe the FY 2025-26 picture.
What Make in India means beyond the numbers
It is easy to read a report like this as a purely economic exercise, but the Make in India opportunity carries a deeper significance. Manufacturing is how nations accumulate capability. Every product line localised builds not just a factory, but a base of suppliers, technicians, designers, and quality systems around it. That ecosystem becomes the foundation for the next generation of products — ones that may not yet exist. A country that learns to manufacture batteries today is better placed to lead in energy storage tomorrow; one that masters circuit-board production is better placed to design the devices those boards go into. This compounding of capability is the quiet engine behind every successful manufacturing economy, and it is precisely what the Make in India mission is designed to ignite.
There is also a matter of national resilience. Recent years have shown how fragile global supply chains can be, with shortages of chips, components, and critical materials disrupting industries worldwide. A nation that builds more of what it consumes is less exposed to those shocks. For India, reducing dependence on any single source of supply is not just an economic goal but a strategic one — and the electronics categories mapped in this report are among the most important places to start. Strengthening domestic manufacturing through Make in India is, ultimately, an investment in stability.
Explore, share, and build
The opportunity is laid out in the interactive report above — sector by sector, product by product. Whether you are an entrepreneur evaluating your next product, an investor scanning for under-served markets, a policymaker shaping industrial strategy, or simply an Indian who believes the country can build more of what it consumes, the message is the same. The demand is already here. The talent is here. The Make in India opportunity is not a slogan but a list — and every line on it is something India can build at home.
If this analysis was useful, share it with a founder, an engineer, or a policymaker who can act on it. The first step to building it here is refusing to scroll past it.
I run a company CAPUF Embedded Private Limited, we help companies who want to design and manufacture in India. You can contact us for any of your product development, optimization or manufacturing needs.
About this data. Figures are from the Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics (DGCI&S), Department of Commerce, Government of India, for FY 2025-26, reported by value of imports from China. “Electronics” covers HS chapters 84–85 plus electronic instruments and components; “All Industries” shows the complete import bill with nothing excluded. Big import value signals strong domestic demand currently met abroad — a localization opportunity, not proof that local production is yet viable.