The Minister claimed that the “entire manufacturing sector was totally stymied by the kind of rules, regulations, and laws” during the previous Congress governments.
Come 2028, India will have its own Apple, Samsung – the global industry’s biggest players in smartphone business – moment, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told NDTV on Friday.
“This is 23 October 2026. Please note it: 23 October 2028. You will have Indian-designed, Indian-manufactured, Indian-branded mobile phones,” Vaishnaw told NDTV World Summit in Delhi.
Demonstrating the complexities involved in the process, the Minister asked NDTV’s Editor-in-Chief Rahul Kanwal, who was interviewing him, to hand him his mobile phone for him to explian better.
“In this small little real estate you have to have radio frequency communication. You have the antenna, compute, memory, all the passive components, a camera module, a display, and power management. Everything has to be built into this small little device. You have to manage the weight, the power management, and everything you have to do within this small little real estate, a small little form factor. That’s why it’s extremely complex to design a mobile phone,” Vaishnaw said.
Three years ago, the Minister said, he threw the challenge to Indian designers.
“Three years back we gave this challenge to Indian designers: why can’t you design the PCB, which is the motherboard of a mobile phone? Why can’t you design that? Two companies came forward and they designed it. One of them designed it very well and today that company’s design has been selected by the largest US telecom service provider,” the Minister said.
“In the US when you buy a phone you also get a 12-month contract with the telecom service provider so they have already got the contract. They have designed and delivered a 5G-plus mobile phone to one of the largest telecom service providers in the US. That phone is today already manufactured and delivered to the customers. That capability we have been able to develop over 3.5 years, over the last few years, and that capability is now available for us,” he said.
“Now we will use that capability to have the Indian brand, Indian design, and Indian IP retained in India and that mobile phone will be one of the largest-selling,” the Minister promised.
The Minister claimed that the “entire manufacturing sector was totally stymied by the kind of rules, regulations, and laws” during the previous Congress governments.
“The entire manufacturing sector was totally stymied by the kind of rules, regulations, and laws the Congress governments of those periods created. From 1990 onwards there was an opening up. That opening up played very well till 2004. From 2004 to 2014 once again that entire control mindset, instead of timing things, that entire left-leaning mindset came and things went back. From 2014 onwards our Prime Minister came back with the philosophy of Make in India,” he said.
