What is the position of India in manufacturing of mobile phones in 2023 ?

Question

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Correct — A, 2nd. India is the world's second-largest manufacturer of mobile phones, behind China, and the Government states it in exactly those words in its own annual economic assessment. Chapter 9 of the Economic Survey 2022-23 records that 'in the mobile phone segment, India has become the second-largest mobile phone manufacturer globally, with the production of handsets going up from six crore units in FY15 to 31 crore units in FY22'. That is a fivefold rise in seven years, and it is the number the rank rests on. Policy did most of the work. Import duties were raised in stages so that assembly had to move into the country, and the Production Linked Incentive scheme then paid manufacturers on incremental sales of India-made handsets; the Survey notes that major global and domestic electronics manufacturing services companies had already taken up the scheme. The results show up in trade data. India's electronics exports to the United States moved from a deficit of USD 0.6 billion in FY17 to a surplus of USD 8.7 billion in FY24, and within electronics the fastest-growing category was mobile phones, whose exports to the United States rose from USD 2.2 billion in FY23 to USD 5.7 billion in FY24. Apple alone assembled about USD 14 billion worth of iPhones in India during FY24, roughly 14 per cent of its global iPhone production. One honest qualification belongs on this card: 'manufacture' here still means assembly for the most part. Domestic value addition in mobile phone output rose from about 8.7 per cent in FY17 to FY19 to 22 per cent in FY20 to FY22 — real progress, but still a minority of the value of each handset.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) 10th — the answer that feels safely modest, and the kind of rank India genuinely held in electronics a decade or more ago before the assembly base moved here. It understates the position by eight places. A country producing more than thirty crore handsets a year is not tenth at anything in that industry, and the figure is easy to check against the growth curve in the Economic Survey.  (c) 4th — the most dangerous of the wrong options, because it is close enough to be believable and because India really does rank third, fourth or fifth in a long list of other sectors, so 'India is in the top five' is a habit of mind rather than a specific memory. On mobile phones specifically the position is second, and it has been stated as second in successive Government documents.  (d) 15th — outside any plausible range and included to complete the spread of the option list. A rank in the teens would put India below most of the smaller manufacturing economies of Europe and South-East Asia, which is inconsistent with the handset output figures the Government publishes and with India's position as a major exporter of phones to the United States.

Concept: Electronics is the sector where India's manufacturing policy of the last decade has produced its clearest measurable result, and the mobile handset is the case study. Two instruments did the work. The first was tariff sequencing: customs duties on finished handsets and then on successive components were raised in phases, so that a company selling phones in India found it cheaper to assemble them here than to import them. The second was the Production Linked Incentive scheme, which pays a manufacturer a percentage of the incremental sales of goods made in India, converting a subsidy into a reward for output rather than for investment alone. The result was that handset production rose from six crore units in FY15 to thirty-one crore in FY22 and India moved to second place globally. The analytical caution that goes with the achievement is the distinction between assembly and value addition. A phone assembled in India whose display, chipset and camera module are imported adds only a fraction of its price to Indian value added, which is why the Economic Survey tracks domestic value addition separately and why it rose from about 8.7 per cent to 22 per cent between the two phases it compares. Rank measures units; value addition measures how much of each unit is genuinely ours.

State PCS 2024 Q27 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q27 — Economy PYQ with Answer