Designing India’s Manufacturing Future — From Assembly to Innovation Leadership 🇮🇳
India’s electronics manufacturing sector holds immense promise, but also faces critical challenges that must be addressed for it to truly emerge as a global manufacturing powerhouse.
At a recent Indo-American Chamber of Commerce (IACC) India Roundtable held in Karnataka, our Co-founder and CRO Karthik M C joined leaders from across aerospace, energy, infrastructure, and manufacturing to discuss the evolving landscape of India’s industrial ecosystem — and what it will take to transform India from a fast-growing manufacturing destination into a design-led, innovation-driven economy.
Karthik shared three pivotal insights during the discussion:
- India’s ESDM market is poised for exponential growth — projected to reach $500 billion by 2030. However, a large share of the value chain continues to depend on imported components, particularly from China. While India has made significant progress in assembly, testing, and packaging, the earlier stages of the value chain — such as component fabrication and high-precision sub-assemblies — remain underdeveloped.
- Low labor costs alone don’t ensure competitiveness. Fragmented supply chains, logistics inefficiencies, and high costs of land, power, and capital often offset the labor advantage. To truly compete on a global scale, India must focus on supply chain consolidation, process productivity, and manufacturing scale — backed by technology-led visibility and collaboration.
- The next frontier: Design Ownership. Karthik emphasized that India’s real manufacturing opportunity lies not in low-cost production but in Original Design Manufacturing (ODM) — building the capability to design, engineer, and produce products end-to-end. ODM has been the backbone of China’s evolution from an assembler to a global product powerhouse. For India, nurturing this design capability — across electronics, mechanical systems, and embedded technologies — will unlock the next phase of value creation.
At Karkhana.io, we’re working to make this vision real.
By combining turnkey manufacturing, competitive sourcing, and deep expertise in mechanical DFM, tooling, and electronic box builds, we help OEMs and startups move from concept to scale — faster, smarter, and more reliably.
Our goal is simple yet ambitious:
To help build products not just for India, but for the world.
To bridge the gap between innovation and execution.
And to power India’s journey from Make in India to Design in India — from assembly to true design-led manufacturing leadership.