The short version.

• Across the whole PLI programme, the government's own headline is ₹35,354 crore disbursed by March 2026 against a ₹1.97 lakh crore approved outlay — about 18% paid out, though the total has climbed steadily (₹23,946cr in September 2025 → ₹28,748cr in December 2025 → ₹35,354cr in March 2026). Scheme by scheme, the pattern repeats: PLI-Auto has paid out ₹2,386.36 crore of a ₹25,938 crore outlay; PLI Solar, green hydrogen, and the battery-cell scheme have paid out zero; PLI Pharmaceuticals has disbursed ₹6,659 crore of ₹15,000 crore.
• The widely-repeated LG Energy Solution–JSW $1.5 billion battery gigafactory appears nowhere in a sweep of nearly 3,800 government documents. The scheme's four actual approved cell-makers are Ola, Reliance (twice), and ACC Energy Storage — not one foreign name among them.
• India's semiconductor subsidy rate has fallen from the 50% Micron received to 40% for fabs and 25–35% for packaging and compound-semiconductor projects under the newly announced ISM 2.0 — a change worth knowing before quoting the old number to anyone.
• A Vizag pharma plant widely attributed to Eli Lilly actually belongs to Eisai — a real, 2009-vintage Japanese manufacturing site independently confirmed; Lilly's India entity has no manufacturing site in any of three CDSCO registries.
• One scheme genuinely has zero winners as of this week: a ₹7,280 crore rare-earth magnet manufacturing programme whose technical bids opened on 13 August 2026, with 20 companies competing for five slots.
• PLI Medical Devices is the rare exception that actually executes — 23 of 27 approved projects already commissioned, investment running ahead of commitment. PLI White Goods is fully executed too, but at least two Chinese-parented beneficiaries, Midea and Haier, are separately navigating India's Press Note 3 FDI-screening gate; Haier has a live ₹1,000 crore capital-infusion filing pending as this article is written.

Approved is not the same word as paid

India's production-linked incentive (PLI) architecture spans roughly fifteen schemes across electronics, autos, pharma, solar, batteries, steel, textiles, and drones, most of them structured to pay out only after a company hits investment and output milestones — which is exactly why "approved" and "disbursed" diverge so sharply in Parliament's own tabled answers.

Zoomed out to the whole programme rather than scheme by scheme, the government's own headline figure is ₹35,354 crore disbursed by March 2026, against an approved outlay across all fourteen sectors of roughly ₹1.97 lakh crore — about 18% paid out. That total has been climbing steadily through the year: the Economic Survey 2025-26 put cumulative disbursement at ₹23,946 crore as of September 2025 (across 806 approved applications, 12 of the 14 sectors actually paying out anything); government sources cited a further milestone of roughly ₹28,748 crore by December 2025; and the ₹35,354 crore figure is the most recent update, as of March 2026. Against that disbursement, the programme has attracted over ₹3.2 lakh crore in realised investment, generated over ₹18.7 lakh crore in incremental production and sales, created upward of 14 lakh direct and indirect jobs, and produced over ₹8.2 lakh crore in exports since the programme's 2020 launch — the macro case for PLI as a whole is genuinely stronger than the disbursement rate alone suggests, since much of its intended effect works through investment commitments and capacity-building rather than the subsidy cheque itself.

Figures compiled from Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha unstarred questions, Ministry of Heavy Industries and MeitY documents, and PIB releases, cross-referenced by a policy-research project (India Policy Analytics' "digital twin" for industrial incentives) and independently spot-checked for this article via public search. The PLI-Auto disbursement figure has been updated here to the more recent ₹2,386.36 crore (as of 31 March 2026) reported by the Ministry of Heavy Industries, superseding an earlier ₹1,350.83 crore figure (30 November 2025) from the same source project's snapshot — a reminder that even a well-sourced figure needs a date attached, because these numbers move.

The battery gigafactory that doesn't exist in any government record

A $1.5 billion LG Energy Solution–JSW battery joint venture has circulated in trade press since December 2024, and it's not hard to see why it stuck — a marquee Korean cell-maker, a marquee Indian conglomerate, a headline number. This blog's own investment-directory research found the underlying report explicitly headlined "Exclusive…sources say," calling the venture non-binding and naming no Indian state at all for it. The India Policy Analytics research goes a step further: a sweep of roughly 3,800 government documents — every Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha question and answer from 2019 to 2026, Ministry of Heavy Industries annual reports, and PIB releases — found zero mentions of LG, SK Innovation/SK On, Samsung SDI, CATL, Panasonic, Gotion, EVE, or BYD anywhere in India's battery-manufacturing record. JSW's only appearance in that record is losing a bid in the fourth waitlist round of a solar-cell tender, unrelated to batteries.

The scheme's actual beneficiaries are considerably less famous and entirely domestic:

All four have claimed zero incentive to date, against ₹5,180 crore invested and 1,277 direct jobs. The often-repeated "10 manufacturers, 178 GWh announced" figure appears in seven separate government documents, verbatim, without the government ever naming the other six. What this actually means for anyone tracking India's battery supply chain: the opportunity isn't a foreign cell-maker choosing India, it's that Ola, Reliance, and ACC now need cathode, anode, separator, and electrolyte suppliers India doesn't yet make domestically — a materials and equipment gap, not a cell-manufacturing one.

Semiconductors: real, concentrated, and the subsidy rate just changed

Unlike batteries, India's semiconductor push is genuinely landed: twelve approved units under the India Semiconductor Mission, roughly ₹1.64 lakh crore in sanctioned investment, three already in commercial production. But it's heavily concentrated — Tata Electronics' Gujarat fab (₹91,526 crore) and Assam ATMP plant (₹27,120 crore) alone account for roughly 72% of the programme's total value.

Micron's Gujarat facility is the clean reference case: ₹22,516 crore (~$2.75 billion), production live since February 2026, built under a 50% central fiscal-support rate. That rate is now historic. Under ISM 2.0, announced in the FY2026-27 budget, fiscal support for new silicon fabs has been reduced to 40%, with compound-semiconductor and display fabs and advanced-packaging projects eligible for up to 35%, and conventional packaging facilities capped at 25%. The shift reflects a stated policy pivot — away from simply attracting fab and packaging capacity, toward building out the equipment, materials, and chip-design ecosystem those fabs still have to import from elsewhere.

The 40%/35%/25% breakdown is independently confirmed via BusinessToday's July 2026 reporting on ISM 2.0 and cross-checked against Policy Circle's coverage of the same budget announcement, refining an earlier "25–35% across the board" characterisation found in the source research.

The fab that isn't there

A Samsung semiconductor fabrication plant in Hyderabad has been reported often enough to sound settled. It isn't. MeitY's own Telangana-specific parliamentary answer names every semiconductor-related beneficiary in the state — three Design Linked Incentive companies, thirteen design-tool companies, twenty-six academic institutes — and no fab. The commonly cited investment figure (₹2,500–3,000 crore) is also roughly thirty times smaller than what an actual fab of Micron's or Tata's scale has cost, a scale mismatch that itself should have been a warning sign.

What is real: Samsung is a PLI-LSEM mobile-phone beneficiary, holds two older M-SIPS approvals in Uttar Pradesh (handsets and colour TVs), and runs Samsung Semiconductor India Research, a roughly 4,500-person chip-design operation — in Bengaluru, not Hyderabad. Samsung has also formally withdrawn from the PLI-Telecom scheme. Separately, Hyderabad does host a real government semiconductor-adjacent facility — GAETEC, a DRDO-linked gallium-arsenide research centre — which appears to be the source of some of the confusion, despite having no connection to Samsung.

Two pharma mix-ups worth correcting

Eli Lilly's Vizag plant is actually Eisai's. The manufacturing site in Visakhapatnam's Jawaharlal Nehru Pharma City, frequently attributed to Eli Lilly, is independently confirmed as belonging to Eisai, the Japanese drugmaker — a real facility, built for roughly $50 million, inaugurated in December 2009, manufacturing API and oral solid-dose tablets including a WHO-donated treatment for lymphatic filariasis. Eli Lilly's India entity, by contrast, has zero manufacturing sites across three separate CDSCO registries; its one manufacturing-type licence covers only overprinting a pen injector at a third-party warehouse. Lilly's actual, current India manufacturing commitment is a separate, 2025-announced project in Telangana, not Andhra Pradesh.

Daiichi Sankyo has no residual investment in India via Ranbaxy. Ranbaxy merged into Sun Pharma in March 2015; Daiichi sold its roughly 8.9% Sun Pharma stake the same year; the joint Indian subsidiary was formally dissolved in 2017. Sun Pharma's most recent annual report contains zero mentions of Daiichi. A separate, real legal matter — Daiichi's Delhi High Court enforcement of a ₹2,562 crore Singapore arbitral award against the Singh brothers, Ranbaxy's former promoters — is a creditor's claim arising from that history, not evidence of any ongoing investment.

Medical devices: the scheme that actually executes

Against the pattern of large outlays and thin disbursement, PLI Medical Devices is an outlier worth naming: 27 approved projects have drawn ₹1,153.07 crore in actual investment against a committed ₹1,136.23 crore — investment slightly ahead of commitment — and 23 of the 27 are already commissioned, with only four still in progress. ₹266.64 crore has been disbursed under the scheme itself, plus a further ₹209.8 crore released separately for medical-device-park infrastructure, government figures confirmed as current through FY25.

One curiosity in the government's own applicant list: GE BE Pvt Ltd, a PET-detector manufacturer on the approved roster, is a joint venture between GE (US) and Bharat Electronics — a Ministry of Defence public-sector undertaking. The Department of Pharmaceuticals states that none of the 27 applicants is itself a PSU, which is technically true of the applicant entity even though a PSU sits inside its ownership structure. Separately, the approved-applicant list has quietly shrunk from 32 to 27 since the scheme's original announcement, with the drops never formally announced; six named companies present in earlier public lists (including Trivitron Healthcare and Sahajanand Medical Technologies) no longer appear.

White goods: PLI approval doesn't clear the FDI-scrutiny question

PLI White Goods is one of the few fully executed schemes — 85 of 85 approved projects complete across four rounds, with a foreign-parented roster spanning Daikin, Panasonic, Mitsubishi Electric, Johnson Controls-Hitachi, LG Electronics, Signify/Philips, Neolite ZKW, and Hella. But scheme approval and India's separate FDI-screening regime for China-bordering countries, Press Note 3 of 2020, are two different gates, and at least two Chinese-parented beneficiaries — Midea India and Haier Appliances India — are approved under PLI while still navigating that second gate.

Haier's situation is live as this article is written: the company has filed a fresh Press Note 3 application seeking government clearance for a ₹1,000 crore capital infusion from its Chinese parent to fund a third India factory, and is separately in advanced talks to sell a 49% stake in its India business to Bharti Group — with Haier retaining 49% and 2% going to Indian employees — a localisation structure widely read as easing the path through Press Note 3 scrutiny for future capital. The broader pattern: India's government has signalled it will more readily clear China-linked joint ventures where the Indian partner holds majority control, while explicitly denying that recent Press Note 3 easing amounts to a general reopening to Chinese capital.

Medical devices figures (investment, disbursement, commissioning status) independently confirmed via Indian Pharma Post and Lokmat Times coverage of Department of Pharmaceuticals statements. The GE BE/Bharat Electronics PSU detail and the 32→27 list shrinkage are drawn from the source research and not independently re-verified against a primary DoP document in this pass. The Haier Press Note 3 filing and Bharti Group stake-sale talks are independently confirmed via BusinessToday (28 November 2025) reporting; the Midea/Haier PLI-approval-plus-FDI-scrutiny framing itself comes from the source research and reflects the general Press Note 3 regime rather than a specific government statement naming these two companies together.

A pattern with a name: the knowledge problem

The battery-scheme story above — a headline foreign deal that appears nowhere in the government record, against four domestic beneficiaries who actually cleared the scheme — is a specific instance of a general pattern this blog has examined at length in a companion piece comparing India's ethanol incentive designs. Friedrich Hayek's 1945 argument in The Use of Knowledge in Society is that the information needed to judge whether a specific project will work is scattered across many people with local knowledge, and a scheme structured to let a broad, self-selected pool of applicants clear a market-based screen (a bank willing to lend, a company willing to commit its own capital against a real business case) tends to surface that information; a scheme whose funding structure only a handful of applicants can even attempt does not. PLI-LSEM and PLI Textiles, both fully executed with dozens of participants, sit at one end of that spectrum; PLI-ACC, with exactly four beneficiaries and zero disbursed after years of headlines about a company that was never actually in the programme, sits at the other. The rare-earth magnet scheme's 20-bidder field for five slots is, on this reading, a genuinely promising sign precisely because it looks like the first design in this list wide enough to let the knowledge problem work in the government's favour.

This is an interpretive lens applied to the empirical pattern already documented above, not a claim about the schemes' designers' own economic priors.

What's genuinely open right now

Most PLI-adjacent opportunities already have incumbents. One doesn't. India's rare-earth permanent-magnet manufacturing scheme — ₹7,280 crore, up to five slots, notified in December 2025 — had zero named beneficiaries as of early August. That changed this month: technical bids opened on 13 August 2026, with the Ministry of Heavy Industries confirming 20 companies submitted bids for the five available slots. The scheme guarantees the three lowest bidders assured NdPr-oxide supply from IREL, India's state miner, and the government's own framing is unambiguous about the gap it's trying to close: "India currently imports all its sintered NdFeB REPM demand." Winners haven't been named yet, which makes this the one part of India's incentive landscape where the field is still genuinely open rather than already claimed by an incumbent.

A second, smaller open door: the SPMEPCI scheme, which trades EV import-duty relief for a local manufacturing and localisation commitment, received zero applications by its original deadline — the terms (a ₹4,150 crore minimum investment, rising domestic-value-addition targets) proved demanding enough that no automaker has yet taken it up, though at least one manufacturer has reportedly signalled intent to re-apply.

Sources and caveats