Why Viksit Tech 47 matters for the gadgets and devices ecosystem, and why sitting this one out is a strategic error. Ask a room full of global investors what India makes, and you will still hear the same answer you heard in 2010: software. Services. Engineering talent. Back-office scale. It is a flattering description, and […]
Why Viksit Tech 47 matters for the gadgets and devices ecosystem, and why sitting this one out is a strategic error.
Ask a room full of global investors what India makes, and you will still hear the same answer you heard in 2010: software. Services. Engineering talent. Back-office scale. It is a flattering description, and it is now roughly a decade out of date.
The numbers have moved decisively. India’s electronics production crossed ₹13.11 lakh crore in FY 2025-26, up from ₹11.32 lakh crore the year before, 15.8% growth.1 Mobile phone production alone touched ₹6.27 lakh crore, a 33-fold rise over the decade, with exports at ₹2.59 lakh crore, a 165-fold increase from ₹1,500 crore in FY 2014-15.2 Smartphones, absent from India’s top 100 exported commodities in 2014, are now the country’s single largest exported commodity, ahead of petroleum and gems and jewellery.3 Electronics as a category has climbed to third-largest export, at ₹4.24 lakh crore (~$48 billion).4 And domestic value addition, the metric sceptics have long used to dismiss the story as glorified screwdriver assembly, has climbed to 18–20%, with a stated target of ~35% for mobile phones.5
That is not an emerging story. That is an arrived one.
And yet the perception gap persists, because a sector that has scaled this fast has never had a platform that tells its story with the same rigour that Barcelona tells telecom’s story, or Las Vegas tells consumer electronics’. India has factories, brands, design houses, and export volumes. What it has not had is a stage.
Viksit Tech 47, a flagship programme within India Mobile Congress 2026, running 7–10 October at Yashobhoomi, New Delhi, exists to close that gap. And for anyone building, selling, or supplying gadgets and devices in this market, it is the wrong year to watch from the sidelines.
1. The three stories India needs to tell simultaneously
Most industry platforms flatten the ecosystem into one narrative. VT47’s structure is more honest, because it recognises that India’s device story is actually three different stories happening at once, and that all three need to be visible for the whole to be credible.
Indigenous brands. Indian-origin companies designing, engineering, and building for India and the world. This is the pillar that carries the emotional weight of the story, and also the one that has been most persistently underestimated. There is a real question sitting inside this category, which Indian brand becomes the first genuine device-led global champion?, and it is a question the ecosystem has never seriously attempted to answer with evidence rather than sentiment.
India as second home. Global technology brands that have made India their second-largest base of operations worldwide. This pillar matters because it reframes what “manufacturing in India” means. When a multinational moves R&D, design authority, and senior decision-making here, not just final assembly, India stops being a cost centre and becomes a centre of gravity. That shift is happening, and it is under-narrated.
Made for the world. India-manufactured devices reaching global markets. This is the pillar that proves scale, quality consistency, and supply-chain resilience, the three things international buyers actually diligence before they commit volume.
Any one of these alone is a partial picture that critics can poke holes in. Together they are a case.
2. Why a platform, and why now
There is a reasonable objection here: India already has trade shows, industry bodies, and government summits. Why does another programme change anything?
Because the missing ingredient was never events. It was a durable, repeatable, evidence-based record, the kind of thing that outlives the week it was published and gets cited by people who were not in the room.
That is what distinguishes what VT47 is attempting. The programme is built around a flagship report charting India’s evolution toward Viksit Bharat 2047, closing with a 20-year roadmap for the sector. Alongside it sits an Index, a dynamically ranked list of 30 promising Indian companies, refreshed annually, and explicitly positioned to become the sector’s benchmark. There are awards with jury review rather than pay-to-play optics, splitting brand recognition (Ratnas) from individual recognition (Icons). There is a dedicated pavilion, a startup module for early-stage gadgets and devices indigenisation, Charcha sessions putting senior leadership on record, and a podcast and factory walkthrough series that takes the story to audiences who will never attend a trade show.7
The word doing the heavy lifting there is annually. An index that gets refreshed every year, and a report that revisits its own roadmap, compounds in authority in a way that a one-off announcement never does. The first edition sets the baseline. Every edition after that becomes a comparison against it.
Which brings us to the uncomfortable part for anyone thinking about waiting a year.
3. The cost of showing up late
Benchmarks are established by whoever is present when they are created. This is not a moral claim, just an observational one, it is how every credible industry index in the world came into being.
If the VT47 Index becomes what it is designed to become, the reference list for India’s device sector, then the companies inside the first edition are not just listed. They are part of the definition of what the list measures. The frame gets built around the people in the room. Everyone who arrives in year three is measured against a standard they had no hand in setting.
The same applies to the report’s roadmap. A 20-year sector roadmap is, functionally, an argument about where policy attention, capital, and talent should go. Being at the table when that argument is drafted is materially different from responding to it after publication.
And there is the simpler point, which is that IMC 2026 is the tenth edition of India’s flagship technology and telecom platform, held under the theme Scale Without Boundaries, with the Department of Telecommunications and COAI behind it. The audience, government, industry, media, international delegations, is already assembled. VT47 is the device sector’s designated space within it. That combination of policy proximity and sector focus does not currently exist anywhere else in the Indian calendar.
4. The larger ambition
There is one more thing worth naming, because it explains why this feels different from a programme track at a conference.
The stated ambition is to build, edition by edition, toward India’s own dedicated consumer electronics show, an Indian CES, in effect. Every major electronics economy has one. India, the world’s second-largest mobile phone manufacturer by volume, where 99.2% of phones sold are made domestically, does not.6
That does not get built by announcement. It gets built by a programme that runs, proves demand, accumulates credibility, and grows. VT47 is the first stone.
The gadgets and devices ecosystem has spent a decade earning a story it has never properly told. The infrastructure to tell it now exists. The question for every brand, manufacturer, component supplier, and gadgets and devices founder reading this is not whether the story is worth telling.
It is whether you want to be in it or read about it.
Viksit Tech 47 takes place as part of India Mobile Congress 2026, 7–10 October, Yashobhoomi, New Delhi. To know more about Viksit Tech 47, please email info@techarc.net.
Disclosure: Techarc is associated with Viksit Tech 47.
1. India’s electronics production rose from ₹11.32 lakh crore (FY 2024-25) to ₹13.11 lakh crore (FY 2025-26), a 15.8% year-on-year increase. Ministry of Electronics & IT data, reported July 2026. IANS Live
2. Mobile phone production grew 33x to ₹6.27 lakh crore between FY 2014-15 and FY 2025-26; exports rose 165-fold from ₹1,500 crore to ₹2.59 lakh crore over the same period. Government data, July 2026. ANI News
3. Smartphones did not feature in India’s top 100 exported commodities in 2014; in FY 2025-26 they became the country’s top individual exported commodity, surpassing petroleum and gems and jewellery. Indian Defence News
4. Electronics exports reached ₹4.24 lakh crore (~$48 billion) in FY 2025-26, an 11-fold increase over the decade, making electronic goods India’s third-largest export category. IANS Live
5. Domestic value addition in electronics manufacturing stands at 18–20%, per MoS Electronics & IT Jitin Prasada (April 2026), supported by PLI-led investments of ₹17,519 crore; the stated target for mobile phones is ~35%. IBEF
6. India is the world’s second-largest mobile phone manufacturer by volume, with 99.2% of phones used in India also made in India. Government data, July 2026. ANI News
7. Programme details — three pillars, Report, Index, Charcha, Pavilion, Awards, Startups module — from the official Viksit Tech 47 partnership brochure, India Mobile Congress 2026.
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