India's electronics story has an assembly-shaped hole in the middle of it. The country has become one of the world's largest smartphone producers — the PLI scheme for large-scale electronics manufacturing has surpassed its production and export targets and generated more than 185,000 direct jobs — but the component layer of the stack remained imported. The Union Cabinet's ₹22,919 crore Components PLI is the attempt to fill it, targeting the sub-components and materials that determine whether a country assembles electronics or makes them.

For the flexible and printed electronics industry, the scheme arrives at an interesting angle. It is not, in the main, a flexible-electronics programme — its lists lean toward mechanical parts, enclosures, passive components and printed circuit boards. But three of its pressure points run directly through territory this publication covers.

Where the scheme touches flexible electronics

  • PCB and substrate localisation — flexible printed circuits and flex substrates sit on the localisation path for everything from wearables to automotive cockpits; every FPC line built in India is a customer for flexible laminates and conductive materials.
  • Display module assembly — as we noted in our automotive displays analysis, cockpit and consumer display module work is migrating to Indian manufacturing; component-sourcing rules push that work toward local suppliers.
  • Wearables and hearables assembly at scale — the highest-volume flexible-electronics-adjacent products assembled in India today; their thin batteries, flex circuits and printed sensors are precisely the component classes the scheme wants localised.
India electronics PLI commitments referenced in this analysis Horizontal bar chart showing three figures: Components PLI scheme value of 22,919 crore rupees (about 2.7 billion dollars), total PLI-attracted investments of 1.61 lakh crore rupees across sectors, and 1.85 lakh direct jobs generated by the Large Scale Electronics Manufacturing PLI. Components PLI outlay ₹22,919 crore PLI investments attracted ₹1.61 lakh crore LSEM direct jobs 1.85 lakh+ Sources: Union Cabinet approval via KPMG analysis (₹22,919 Cr components scheme); MeitY/PIB releases on LSEM PLI performance (investments, jobs). Bars scaled for comparison only — the three figures measure different things.
Fig. 1 — The three headline numbers of India's electronics push. The components outlay is the newest and the one flexible-electronics suppliers should read most closely.

The honest gap: no display or battery fab yet

What the scheme does not yet answer is the deepest layer of the stack. India still imports effectively all of its display glass and cells, and its battery cells — the two most capital-intensive component layers. The India Semiconductor Mission addresses logic fabs and assembly/test; a display fab remains an aspiration rather than a line item; cell manufacturing is only now moving from announcement to ground-breaking. Until those layers localise, India's flexible-electronics role is module assembly and component integration — valuable, growing, but dependent on imported panels and cells.

That gap is also the opportunity this desk watches closest. A domestic display module ecosystem creates demand for local lamination, optical bonding and test — the exact skills that later host panel making. Domestic wearable assembly creates demand for local flex-circuit and printed-sensor supply. The component scheme, read correctly, is a ladder: each localised layer improves the economics of localising the next one.

What suppliers should watch

  1. Tranche awards — which companies win component PLI support, and in which component classes, maps the next five years of Indian supply-chain capacity.
  2. Localisation schedules in automotive — cockpit display module sourcing rules pull FPC, connector and laminate demand into India faster than consumer programmes do.
  3. The medical-device angle — patch and wearable medical assembly in India is growing on its own economics; every local line is a natural customer for printed batteries and sensors, components light enough to ship but valuable enough to localise.

The question for India's electronics decade is no longer "can it assemble?" — the phones proved that. It's whether ₹22,919 crore buys the layers underneath.

For an industry watcher who has covered this space since the printed-electronics roadmaps of 2008, the current moment is qualitatively new: for the first time, the demand side (assembly at scale), the policy side (money attached to component depth) and the technology side (flexible components finally shipping in volume products) are all pointing the same direction at the same time. The gaps are real — but the direction is the story.