A quiet shift on India’s factory floors is rewriting the country’s manufacturing story.
Nearly 100,000 young women are now assembling iPhones in India for global markets, a scale of employment that industry executives say marks one of the largest private-sector hiring and skilling exercises of women workers in the country.
Latest employment figures submitted to the government by Apple’s contract manufacturers — Foxconn and Tata Electronics — show that the five iPhone factories operating in the country employ as many as 140,000 workers during peak production cycles. About 70% of them, close to 100,000 employees, are women largely in the 19-24 age group.
Most are first-time job seekers.
The hiring surge has taken place over the past five years after Apple began large-scale iPhone production in India following the launch of the smartphone production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme in 2020. The scheme is scheduled to end on March 31, 2026, and government officials say work is under way on a second variant aimed at sustaining the momentum in electronics manufacturing and exports.
The scale of employment is significant in the context of wider concerns about technology-led job losses. Officials have increasingly pointed to labour-intensive manufacturing sectors such as electronics assembly as an important source of new jobs at a time when artificial intelligence is expected to reshape employment across several industries.
Of the five iPhone factories currently operating in India, two are run by Foxconn and three by Tata Electronics. Together, they represent what industry executives describe as the largest single-brand factory workforce in the country.
New Workforce
The size of the workforce varies across plants. Tata Electronics’ Pegatron unit, which is the smallest of the five facilities, employs more than 18,000 blue-collar workers, while the largest Foxconn plant can employ over 40,000 workers during peak production cycles.
Women make up the majority of this workforce, with their share exceeding 80% in some factories, according to industry estimates.
The expansion has also involved large-scale skilling programmes run by the companies themselves. Each worker undergoes a six-week training programme at the factory before being deployed on the shop floor. The training is provided free of cost and is conducted within the factory premises without direct government funding.
Industry executives say the scale of hiring and training represents one of the largest private-sector efforts to skill women workers in the manufacturing sector.
Supporting infrastructure is also being built around these factories. Nearly 100,000 hostel beds for women employees are being developed in close proximity to the manufacturing facilities starting 2025. Two of the residential complexes under construction in Tamil Nadu alone are designed to house more than 18,000 women workers each, which is among the largest worker accommodation facilities in the country.
Wages in the smartphone manufacturing industry have also risen over the PLI period. According to industry body ICEA, the average monthly wage has increased from around Rs 11,000 in 2019, before the scheme was introduced, to nearly Rs 20,000 by 2025.
Production numbers underline the sector’s rapid expansion. During the tenure of the PLI scheme, Apple assembled iPhones worth more than $70 billion in India, of which roughly $50 billion — about 70% — were exported, according to filings submitted by vendors while claiming incentives under the programme.
Electronics and IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has said that smartphone exports from India reached about $30 billion in calendar year 2025.
PLI Transformation
The surge has dramatically altered India’s export basket. Smartphones, which ranked 167th among the country’s export items in 2015, have now emerged as India’s single largest export category.