Every fourth working woman in India is estimated to work in the factories of Tamil Nadu, with over 38,837 registered manufacturing units of the state employing her, thus dominating the national discourse of gender and economic inclusion.
The center of this change is one plant in Sriperumbudur, an industrial town near Chennai - and a collaboration of two of the most influential tech brands in the world.
Apple has one of the most critical iPhone assembly sites in Sriperumbudur, Foxconn factory complex. Three times per day, its gates open to swallow buses ferrying thousands of workers — around three-quarters of them women.
The Sriperumbudur factory employs 41,000 workers of which 35,000 are women. That is a labor force structure that hardly ever occurs on this scale in any other part of the world.
And Foxconn isn't stopping there. Foxconn, with a $1.5 billion investment to establish a new mega-campus outside Chennai, and intending to locate there 30,000 workers, will make its Tamil Nadu presence one of the biggest electronic manufacturing in the world.
The Tamil Nadu model is not merely about the jobs, but an ecosystem around the jobs. To provide accommodation to its women employees in Sriperumbudur, Foxconn has invested 230 million in establishing a housing complex that can house up to 18,720 workers.
A special housing project has also been initiated by the Tamil Nadu government on behalf of such women workers-the Vallam Vadagal Industrial Housing Project- a 706.5 crore project which is located in SIPCOT Industrial Park in Kancheepuram district and covers an area of 20 acres.
This is the same trend as China, where large masses of women are employed in factories as external migrants, with the support of state-constructed housing ecosystems around their places of employment.
The women-in-manufacturing tale in Tamil Nadu goes far past iPhones.
Ola Futurefactory in Krishnagiri, which will be the largest electric two-wheeler factory in the world, is completely women-powered, with the intention of hiring 20,000 women by 2025.
One of the earliest OEMs established by a woman in India is Ampere Ranipet where more than 70 per cent of the employees are women.
The model is being replicated northwards. The new iPhone assembling plant that Foxconn has opened in Bengaluru employed nearly 30,000 employees within nine months, the quickest hiring spurt at any manufacturing facility in India.
Approximately 80 percent of such workers are women, most aged 19 to 24 years old, who are first-time workers in formal jobs.
The novel does not lack in complexity. In 2024, there were reports that migrant women working on assembling iPhones in the Sriperumbudur plant were subjected to exploitative work and living conditions, and limited freedom of movement in hostels.
The National Human Rights Commission of India also intervened when there were complaints that Foxconn was depriving married women of assembly assignments in its factory in Tamil Nadu.
These issues are a good reminder that the magnitude of jobs should be equal to the level of working conditio
By 2025, Apple might produce 25 per cent of all iPhones in India, compared to 5 per cent in 2022 - and the most significant historic transformation is the women workers in Tamil Nadu.
The previously geopolitical tale of diversification of supply chains and supply chain has turned into a tale on the ground of millions of rural Indian women entering the formal economy first.
Tamil Nadu has demonstrated that the ambition to manufacture and gender inclusion do not conflict as objectives.
They may, and in the most industrialised state of India to the south, they do, go hand in hand.
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