India has paid US$1.02 billion in incentives to boost local manufacturing, following over US$13 billion in investments from private firms under a scheme introduced in 2020, a top government official said on Wednesday (Apr 3).

The US$24 billion production-linked incentive scheme (PLI) is India’s key industrial policy and covers 14 sectors ranging from electronic products to drones.

Critical to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plans to promote India as a global manufacturing hub, the scheme has drawn participation from large global and Indian firms including Apple, Foxconn, Samsung Electronics, Hindustan Unilever and Reliance Industries.

It has also helped push mobile phone exports to a record US$15 billion in the fiscal year that ended March 31, according to industry estimates.

“The scheme has had a good impact and incentive disbursements have also picked up,” Rajesh Kumar Singh, top bureaucrat at India’s Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, told Reuters.

India has exported goods worth 3 trillion rupees (S$48.4 billion) to 3.5 trillion rupees under the PLI scheme, the official said.

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Production in sectors such as mobile phones, electronics and food processing has “moved faster”, while that in white goods and drones has also picked up, he said.

Still, textile and specialty steel sectors are seeing some lag and the incentives for those may require tweaks, Singh, whose department oversees the scheme’s implementation, said.

India regularly reviews the scheme’s uptake.

There are no “immediate plans” to expand the incentives to other sectors, the official said. REUTERS