Is India's New Industrial Revolution Real?

A new chip plant in Gujarat used three and a half Eiffel Towers’ worth of steel in its cleanroom alone.

The plant belongs to Micron, the American memory-chip maker, and opened in February 2026 at Sanand, near Ahmedabad. It packages and tests memory chips. Micron’s chief executive, Sanjay Mehrotra, made the Eiffel Tower comparison ahead of the opening.

Named as an illustration, not a recommendation to buy or sell.

On the other side of the country, Google is building a $15 billion AI hub in Visakhapatnam, on the Andhra Pradesh coast, between 2026 and 2030. UNCTAD, the United Nations trade body, ranked it the largest new foreign investment project announced anywhere in the world in 2025.

Projects like these have started a debate about whether India is in a new industrial revolution.

The answer depends on which industries you look at.

Industries Growing Faster Than the Economy

A handful of Indian industries are growing several times faster than the economy around them. They are defence, mobile phones and electronics, data centres, aircraft parts and solar manufacturing.

Each has its own engine. Defence is a government priority: since 2020 the Ministry of Defence has listed equipment the armed forces must buy from Indian makers, and it now pushes exports too. Phones and electronics grew on a production-linked incentive scheme launched in 2020, and on brands such as Apple moving part of their production out of China.

Data centres are pulled by cloud computing and artificial intelligence, and by rules that keep some data, such as payments data, inside India. Aircraft parts ride a global shortage: Airbus and Boeing have more orders than they can build, and in 2023 Air India and IndiGo alone ordered close to 1,000 planes.

Solar factories grew behind import duties and a government list of approved panel makers.

Two forces run through all of them. Foreign companies want a second base outside China, and the government offers incentives and, in some industries, requires local production.

The pace shows in the numbers. Defence exports are up 4.6 times in five years and electronics exports 4.3 times, while the economy as a whole grew about 1.8 times in rupee terms.

Hindustan Aeronautics (HAL), the state-run aircraft maker, now has orders worth about eight years of its revenue.

How much bigger in five years

From FY21 to FY26, every industry on the chart outgrew the economy, defence production only narrowly. FY21 was a COVID-hit year, which flatters any growth measured from it.

Part of that speed comes from a small start. Defence exports were just ₹686 crore in FY14. Growth from a base that small is not a pace to assume for the next five years.

A Few at Scale, Most Still Small

Fast growth is one half of the picture. Size is the other, and here India’s new industries split in two.

Two have reached world scale. India now makes 18 per cent of the world’s smartphones, and its factories can make 14 to 17 per cent of the world’s solar panels.

Scale in phones is still mostly assembly. India adds about 22 to 23 per cent of a phone’s value, up from about 15 per cent when the industry started out, according to the Electronics Ministry’s secretary.

The ministry’s stated aim is 35 to 40 per cent, though it has given no date; China is already at 38 to 40 per cent, according to the industry body ICEA.

The rest are still small against the world. Data centres, electronics exports, space and aircraft parts each hold one to two per cent of their global market. Shipbuilding and battery cells hold less than a tenth of one per cent.

India's share of world markets

Seven of the nine industries on the chart hold under 4 per cent of their world market.

Read more below.

Small size cuts both ways. An industry with 1 per cent of its world market has room to grow, but little say over the prices, rules and buyers it depends on.

Trade rules show it. The US takes about a fifth of India’s goods exports, and it has changed its duties on Indian goods at least five times since April 2025.

Indian solar panels face a far steeper wall: in September 2026 the US Commerce Department set duty rates of more than 100 per cent on them, with a final vote by the US International Trade Commission due on 14 October.

Europe has added its own rule. Since January 2026 its carbon border tax charges importers of steel and aluminium for the carbon released in making them. An ICRIER study estimates it could cut Indian steel exports to Europe by 24 per cent.

For an industry that sells into a few markets, one rule abroad can change the outlook.

From Assembly to Engineering

The kind of work India does is changing too, from assembling products to engineering them. The clearest sign is where the world’s aircraft and engine makers now place their engineers and their most demanding work.

Boeing says its India engineering team, more than 6,000 people, is the largest it has outside the United States. In October 2024 Airbus and Tata opened India’s first private-sector final assembly line for military aircraft, building C295 transport planes at Vadodara. In November 2025 Safran, the French engine maker, announced a centre in Hyderabad to repair LEAP jet engines.

The shift reaches beyond aircraft. Engineering exports have grown from about $70 billion in FY15 to $122.43 billion in FY26. Global companies, most of them foreign, now run 2,117 capability centres in India, employing 2.36 million people in technology, engineering, product and operations work, according to Nasscom and Zinnov. In the largest centres, about 43 per cent of staff work in engineering and research.

The move is real, and it is early. Electronic components were only 9 per cent of India’s electronics production in FY24, against about 42 per cent worldwide. The C295 is an Airbus design and the LEAP a Safran engine: India builds and repairs them, and the designs stay abroad.

Young Liu’s forecast in 2023 came with a condition: no major changes.

Three years on, trade rules have changed more than once.

The plants, the engineering teams and the export orders have kept coming so far.