Why doesn't India build industrial robot arms at scale?

In 2024 India installed 9,120 industrial robots, its sixth-largest tally in the world and up 7 percent on the previous year. Almost none of them were built in India.

The industrial robot arm is one of the defining machines of modern manufacturing: a multi-axis mechanical arm that moves a tool through space with sub-millimetre repeatability, thousands of times an hour, for years. It is the physical unit of automation — the thing that welds a car body, loads a press, or picks a part off a moving line. India buys these arms in growing numbers and builds almost all of them elsewhere.

The reason the arm is hard is that it is not one device but a stack. Each joint needs a high-precision servo motor and drive to hold position under load. A controller running motion-planning software must coordinate all axes in real time and optimise the path between points. The structure must be light enough to move quickly yet stiff enough that the tool returns to the same coordinate every cycle. And the arm is useless without end-effectors and sensors matched to the specific job. Getting any one of these right is an engineering problem; getting all of them to work together, cheaply and reliably, is why only a handful of countries dominate the field.

Those countries are few. The global leaders are based in Japan (Fanuc, Yaskawa), Switzerland (ABB), and Germany (KUKA), with a growing presence in China and South Korea. Eight nations hold the front rank of this capability. India is a large and fast-growing customer of theirs, not yet a peer producer.

Where India stands is best described as emerging. Its operational stock of industrial robots reached 52,570 units in 2024, tenth worldwide — a real installed base, but one whose robots are overwhelmingly imported or foreign-branded. Domestic manufacturing exists, but at small scale. Systemantics designs and manufactures its ASYSTR six-axis collaborative robotic arms — cobots built to share a workspace with people — entirely in India, launching the Made-in-India ASYSTR 600 at IMTEX 2019 and describing them as the first cobots completely designed and made in the country. TAL Manufacturing Solutions, part of Tata, launched the TAL Brabo articulated robot in 2016, described as the country's first industrial articulated robot. Both remain at limited production. Much of the broader Indian robotics industry, meanwhile, concentrates on integration, programming and services for imported robots rather than building the arms themselves.

The gap persists because it sits on foundations that are themselves still forming. The two most critical dependencies — high-precision servo motors and drives, and robot controllers with motion-planning software — are both assessed as emerging capabilities in India, and both are rated high in criticality. The lighter parts of the stack, the structural materials and joints and the end-effectors and sensors, are closer to home-grown production. But an arm is defined by its hardest components. Without domestic actuation and control, an Indian-built arm is an assembly of imported intelligence, and volume production of full industrial arms has no evidence base yet.

What it would take is legible from the structure of the problem. The installed base and the pace of installations show demand is not the constraint; the constraint is upstream, in servos, drives and controllers. Firms such as Systemantics and TAL have shown the arm itself can be designed and built in India. Closing the gap means moving the emerging dependencies — precision actuation and real-time control software — toward reliable, affordable domestic supply, so that arms built here are Indian below the surface as well as at the badge. The market to absorb them already exists.