Less than 50 km from the heart of the country's power centre, thousands of skilled workers can be seen working 24 hours a day to produce the most ubiquitous element for our lives — the humble smartphone.

At a factory in Sector 58, Noida, Indian mobile manufacturer Lava International, has built what looks like its corporate office from the outside. But, inside the five-storied building, about 2,500 ITI and high school graduates spend their days or nights meticulously putting together hundreds of components of a mobile handset and testing them for every possible defect.

Lava, which started local manufacturing in India less than two years ago, already has two of its factories in Noida running full capacity, making 30 lakh mobile phones each a month. The two factories in turn employ 5,000 skilled and semi-skilled people.

The Government’s Make in India movement has helped turn the Delhi suburb into the country’s largest mobile manufacturing hub, providing better jobs and working conditions for tens of thousands of people. Proximity to Delhi and the city's improving infrastructure and development as a large residential hub supplementing Delhi, has made Noida a favourite for mobile companies.

Apart from Lava, Noida is home to most major mobile manufacturers in the country, including Samsung, LG, OnePlus, and Karbonn.

Growth contributors “Manufacturing of electronics, especially the mobile handset industry, has witnessed growth owing to the ‘Make in India’ campaign. As part of this initiative, reforms such as the differential duty advantage in favour of domestic mobile handset manufacturers, M-SIPS for electronic manufacturing and the availability of critical fiscal and non-fiscal incentives by the Government has contributed to the growth,” said Sanjeev Agarwal, Chief Manufacturing Officer at Lava International.

Shifting large part of its mobile manufacturing from China to India, has helped the company improve quality substantially.

Videocon facility About 1,500 km away in Aurangabad, SK Shelgaonkar got his first job 23 years ago, assembling colour TVs at Videocon’s mother factory. Today, he is the General Manager and Head of Operations at the 30-year-old Aurangabad factory, a sprawling 450-acre facility. There are over a 100 different models of feature phones and smartphones that come out from 12 assembly lines. Plans are on to expand this to 18 lines by the end of this year, increasing production to 25 lakh units.

But despite government's efforts, mobile manufacturing in the country continues to be more of a screwdriver job, with every single part coming from China and assembled in high-tech factories in India.

Lava’s Agarwal said in order to encourage actual manufacturing of handsets and to move up the value chain, India needs to ensure that duties on mobile components go down further.

According to data compiled by the Indian Cellular Association (ICA), the industry body representing mobile phone brands, handset manufacturing in 2015-16 rose a robust 185 per cent in value terms to ₹54,000 crore from ₹19,000 crore in 2014-15.

This could increase further, but the industry needs massive investments in facilities and training its workforce, and needs to stop depending on imports from across the border and paying lip-service to the ‘Make in India’ theme.

Published on February 1, 2017