Alex Travelli and Hari Kumar report from Devanahalli, India in yesterday's New York Times on the pending opening of an iPhone factory. The story features many descriptors suggesting the remoteness and rurality of the place and concludes with a brief comparison to rural development efforts in the United States. The plant, which will be fully functioning and employing 40,000 people by the end of this calendar year, responds to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's “Make in India” policy, announced in 2015. The Modi government has committed $26 billion to subsidizing strategic manufacturing goals since 2020.
A new iPhone factory in an out-of-the-way corner of India looks like a spaceship from another planet. Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles most of the world’s iPhones for Apple, has landed amid the boulders and millet fields of Devanahalli.
By the end of 2025, with the Devanahalli plant fully online, Foxconn is expected to be assembling between 25 and 30 percent of iPhones in India.
The effects on the region are transformative. It’s a field day for job-seekers and landowners. And the kind of crazy-quilt supply chain of smaller industries that feeds Apple’s factory towns in China is coalescing in India’s heartland.
India’s most urgent reason for developing industry is to create jobs. Unlike the United States, it does not have enough: not in services, manufacturing or anything else. Nearly half its workers are involved in farming.
India is thick with people. A five-minute walk away, a village called Doddagollahalli looks the same as it did before Foxconn landed. Nearly all the houses clustered around a sacred grove belong to farming families growing millet, grapes and vegetables.
Some villagers are renting rooms to Foxconn workers. Many more are trying to sell their land. But Sneha, who goes by a single name, has found a job on the Foxconn factory’s day shift. She holds a master’s degree in mathematics. She can walk home for lunch every day, a corporate lanyard swinging from her neck.
It is people like Sneha, and the thousands of her new colleagues piling into her ancestral place, who make Foxconn’s ambitions for India possible. Mr. Trump wants to revive the fortunes of left-behind American factory towns, but the pipeline of qualified young graduates is not there.
Thus, while Trump wants this to happen in the United States, it probably won't, "without sustained government financial support to revive U.S. manufacturing and training to expand the pool of qualified factory workers."
