SRIPERUMBUDUR, India — The women knocking on doors of the employment agencies that dot the roads of this industrial town are one sign of how India has profited from U.S. tensions with China.
Here in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, many seek work at one company: FoxConn, which manufactures iPhones for Apple. Women make up some 70% of the Sriperumbudur plant's workforce.
Twenty-one-year-old Keerthana, who only has one name, was sleepily waiting for a bus to the FoxConn dormitory housing women employees. She'd arrived in the morning on the overnight bus from her hometown. An agency immediately offered her a job at FoxConn. She said she wasn't sure what job she'd be assigned, but she was told she'd earn $170 a month, double her previous wages in a garment factory. "I'll send the money to my father," she beamed. "It will really help us."
Such wages are life-changing for many Indian women, and for that, says former Indian government economic adviser Arvind Subramanian, "I am unambiguously in favor of manufacturing. Because you get many, many more women getting jobs."
Getting more women into poverty-lifting work is a key reason why India, and Tamil Nadu in particular, seeks to attract more labor-intensive manufacturing. More than 40% of women who work in India's factories do so in Tamil Nadu, although the state is home to only 6% of India's 1.4 billion people.
Now India is hoping it will have a chance to lure more manufacturing to its shores amid deteriorating U.S.-China relations and as the Trump administration's tariff policies make it more expensive to do business in China.
"Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi's big bet is that as more and more companies are seeking to exit China … India is poised to play in a very big way," says Milan Vaishnav, who directs the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan international affairs think tank.
It would build on India's achievements in attracting manufacturing as the mood against China grew hostile during the first Trump administration, and through the pandemic, when concerns grew over China's dominance of global supply chains. India continued attracting manufacturing through the Biden years, as the former president kept Trump-era tariffs on some Chinese-made products and raised others.
"The fact that China was discriminated against," says Subramanian, "meant that India was a good place from which to sell back to the United States."
One company that shifted operations from China to India in 2017 was FoxConn, a decision widely seen as reflecting Apple's plans to diversify its manufacturing.
Now India manufactures nearly 15% of all Apple iPhones, and is the second largest exporter after China. India hopes to nearly double its share of iPhone manufacturing to 25% in the coming years. Last year it exported over $20 billion worth of mobile phones — a 44% rise over 2023, spotlighting how rapidly this market is growing.
But there's a key obstacle to India's hopes of attracting more manufacturing: Trump's China tariff policies. Indian analysts say he's been softer than expected on China, where he imposed 20% tariffs — after campaigning on imposing up to 60% tariffs.
"We haven't seen Mr. Trump as being as tough as he was expected to be," says Suhasini Haidar, diplomatic editor of The Hindu. Indian officials hoped "the U.S. would get so tough on China that eventually companies would be forced to move to a country like India," she says. "That promise has not played out so far."
Ashutosh Varshney, director of the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University, says Trump's relatively soft approach toward China may be due to "Elon Musk's rising profile in the Trump power structure." Musk's business interests are entrenched in China.
Then there are Trump's grievances with India over its trade surplus with the U.S., its largest trading partner, which was $45 billion last year. India's tariffs — which the United States Trade Representative said in its 2024 report are "the highest of any major world economy" — range from 45% on vegetable oils to 150% on alcoholic drinks and 100% on coffee.
During his State of the Union address, Trump said reciprocal tariffs on India and other countries would begin on April 2. India may lose up to $7 billion in trade with the U.S. if those tariffs are applied, Reuters reports, citing Citigroup.
But a Tamil Nadu government representative tells NPR he believes companies will continue shifting to India because of other factors — including a desire to diversify from China and to base themselves in a large consumer market. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue of tariffs is politically sensitive in India.
But, he said, "what hurts pipeline investment more than bad policy is uncertainty," referring to weeks of Trump's announcements on how, and when, tariffs would be imposed.
The ways in which India might be affected are no concern for this Trump administration, says Varshney.
"American companies making more investments abroad is not what Mr. Trump wants," he says. "American companies making more investments in America and foreign companies making investments in America is what he wants."
Omkar Khandekar and Vinodh Arulappan contributed to this report.
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