For most of the last decade, when an Indian warehouse or factory floor wanted to automate, it looked abroad. The robots came from Germany, Japan, South Korea and China, economies that had spent thirty years building the component supply chains, precision manufacturing base and engineering talent pools that robotics demands. India, by contrast, counted just 52,570 industrial robots in operational use in 2024, even as the five most automated economies each carry an operational stock of roughly 300,000 to two million machines. That gap has long been read as a weakness, but increasingly, it now reads as headroom.
WHY INDIA LEANED ON THE WORLD, AND WHY THAT IS CHANGING
The early reliance on imported robotics was not a failure of ambition; it was a function of timing. Building robots at scale requires deep component ecosystems in motors, sensors, batteries and controllers that India’s manufacturing base had not yet matured into. Consequently, global vendors, with decades of R&D behind them, were simply the fastest route to automation for a market that needed it quickly.
That calculus is shifting. India’s robotics market, valued at an estimated $1.98 billion in 2025, is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 15.74% a year through 2034, among the fastest expansion rates in Asia, and warehouse automation spending alone, at $0.66 billion in 2026, is projected to more than double by 2031 as e-commerce and quick commerce push fulfilment volumes higher. Imported systems, often engineered for different labour costs and facility formats, are increasingly a mismatch for the density and space constraints of Indian warehouses. A generation of Indian engineers is now choosing to build rather than only integrate, and government programmes around production-linked incentives and deep-tech innovation are lowering the cost of doing so domestically.
That gap has long been read as a weakness. Increasingly, it now reads as headroom.
THE STRATEGIC CASE FOR BUILDING IN INDIA
Designing and manufacturing robotics domestically is not simply a matter of national pride; it is a resilience strategy. Homegrown engineering keeps critical intellectual property, and the jobs that come with it, onshore. Domestic manufacturing shortens supply chains otherwise exposed to currency swings, shipping delays and geopolitical disruption, all of which have proven costly in recent years. It also lets systems be engineered for Indian conditions from the outset — tighter floor plates, mezzanine structures, power fluctuations that imported robotics may not be designed around.
This shift extends well beyond warehousing. Robotics sits at the intersection of precision manufacturing, semiconductors, AI and advanced materials, the same capabilities India is now investing in through its semiconductor fabrication push and emerging deep-tech clusters. Every indigenous robotics company that scales its engineering and manufacturing at home strengthens that broader base, building the component suppliers, testing infrastructure and specialised talent pool that other deep-tech sectors also depend on. In that sense, robotics is not a standalone industry so much as an accelerant for India’s wider Make in India and self-reliance ambitions.
WHY GLOBAL DEPLOYMENT MATTERS
Perhaps the clearest signal of this ecosystem’s maturity is not domestic adoption but export. Indian-built robotic systems are increasingly finding their way into warehouses across Europe, the US, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, competing on performance rather than price alone. That is a meaningful milestone: it marks the point at which India moves from being a market that robotics companies sell into to a source of technology the rest of the world buys from.
This article is authored by, Pramod Ghadge, Co-Founder and CEO of Unbox Robotics, a global warehouse automation company that designs and deploys intelligent robotic systems.
