Apple suppliers, Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron are planning to invest nearly $900 million in India in the next five years. The move is masterminded by a new production-linked incentive (PLI) that is designed to encourage Indian export.

Reuters reported that the PLI scheme has $6.65 billion cash incentives that encourage companies to increase sales of locally-made smartphones over the next five years, compared with 2019-20 levels. According to sources who spoke to Reuters on anonymity, the three Apple suppliers are planning to invest under the scheme.

The sources said Foxconn has applied to invest about 40 billion rupees ($542 million), while Winstron and Pegatron are investing about 13 billion rupees and 12 billion rupees respectively.

The initiative will be a big boost for Apple, though it’s not clear if the deal will involve other smartphone makers. Foxconn and Winstron make devices for other companies globally, while Pegatron makes for Apple only.

India is planning to transform into an export manufacturing country through the PLI scheme, and sources said the vast majority will be focused on expanding iPhone manufacturing.

According to one of the sources, Wistron is planning to double the assembling of second-generation iPhone SE from 200,000 to 400,000 monthly in India. Under the PLI scheme, it will cater to export demand of iPhones from India. The move is expected to create 10,000 jobs.

While there are Chinese companies to contend with, Apple seems to be the focus. One of the sources explained that Foxconn, which also assembles devices for Xiaomi in India, already has the manufacturing capacity that fits any export plan, meaning that the PLI will be largely about Apple.

One of the sources said Pegatron is yet to start operation in India but is in talks with several states, with Tamil Nadu in the south emerging as a frontrunner for a planned plant to manufacture Apple devices.

The PLI will help Apple to take a position beside Xiaomi and Samsung in the Indian market, and diversify its supply chain beyond China. In China, Foxconn is Apple’s main iPhone assembler and has been largely responsible for Apple’s iPhone production in Zhengzhou. The Chinese city has come to be known as “iPhone city” because half of the world’s iPhones are made there.

As Apple is working to meet the deadline on the release of iPhone 12 and three other editions, Foxconn appears to have Indian operations in mind to boost Apple’s supply chain from India. Apple is preparing its supply chain for 75 million iPhones this year, which is in tandem with the orders of last year’s iPhone 11.

But it could be more than that, with its record of yearly increment in sales, orders for iPhone 12 could go far higher than expected despite the impact of COVID-19 pandemic, and that means a need to operate another large manufacturing hub away from Zhengzhou.

Local manufacturing has become a strategy for smartphone producers to cut the cost of devices, and a large market like India deserves a manufacturing plant for Apple.

“India is key to Apple’s global ambitions as it expands beyond China. It offers a strategic market to them where skilled labor is cheaper as compared to other manufacturing destinations, the size of the internal market is huge and the export potential is enormous,” said Tarun Pathak, an associate director at tech researcher Counterpoint.

Local manufacturing helps companies to avoid import-based taxes and produce more affordable smartphones. Apple started to assemble a low-cost phone in India in 2017, through Wistron’s local unit in the tech hub of Bengaluru. In 2019, it involved Foxconn and Wistron as it started to assemble iPhones.

The PLI has thus opened a new wave of local production competition between smartphone manufacturers. Samsung has a mega mobile phone manufacturing plant in New Delhi, where it tests new devices and assembles them for export.

With the smartphones giants taking on online stores in India to maintain sales in the face of the pandemic, the Indian market competition is about to take a new turn.

I went to my children’s school the day it reopened after the pandemic and was surprised to see how quiet the classes were. I looked into the classrooms as I headed to the Headmistress office and couldn’t help but laugh at what I saw: the children were seriously trying to copy down what was on the board into the notebooks. It’s heartbreaking as I think of it now. But then, the amount of concentration I saw in those pupils clicked something off my brain: they have forgotten how to write.

I later approached my 7-year old son’s teacher and inquired of how the students were performing. She hissed, shook her head and said, “You won’t believe it if I tell you most of them have forgotten how to write A B C D to Z.” And this is Primary 2.

This young lady’s encounter is also faced by many teachers across the country; for those that have resumed anyway. Many students and pupils have forgotten what they were taught in school before the pandemic. Some are even beginning to readjust to the school environment. In fact, both teachers and their students/pupils are working hard to shake off the effect of the pandemic on education.

But then, the pandemic wasn’t the cause of this problem; it only created an opportunity for us to see it. Our education system has always had issues and that is why students struggle with their academics in this country. Academic activities are always made to look like war, our classrooms are given the face of a battle ground, and the students are made to believe that they must win those battles. We no longer send our children to school in order to pick up knowledge about the things in the environment; we send them to school to compete with their peers. For that, the only things they do there are to cram whatever the teacher said, pour them out on exam scripts, pick up good grades, and then forget everything that was taught. This cycle repeats itself the following term and the term after that and so it continues.

Today, teachers are paying for the mistakes committed by everyone: teachers, parents, pupils and the government. The teachers have their own share of the blame because they rush through their works in order to cover up their schemes. For that, they devise improper and outdated teaching methods that will instil sentences into the students and not knowledge. Hence, when these students forget the sentences, the underlying knowledge fizzles out with them.

We as parents have also contributed to this problem. We want our two-year old children in pre-nursery to start reading comprehension passages and writing two-paged compositions. If a school authority decides to take it easy with them so that they will learn at their pace, we either tell them to hurry up or we will withdraw our children to miracle-working schools, where teachers have mastered the act of mechanical teaching and learning. Hope we’re enjoying that now.

The government that packs up a lot of topics and subjects for children to study also has their share in the blame. How many times have their inspectoral bodies gone round to supervise how these children are taught? The Ministry of Education and Nigerian Educational Research and Development Centre (NERDC) should consider reducing the number of topics pupils in Primary 1 to 3 do in every subject. Five topics in a subject per term, as against ten or more that is obtainable now, is enough for these children. That way, teachers can spread a topic to two or three weeks and take their time to make sure that the students understood and assimilated what they learnt.

As for we parents, let’s concentrate on teaching our children how to improve on themselves and not how to compete with their classmates. Most of the great men and women in history were not the best in their classes; some of them were even marked off by their teachers. But look at them today, history remembers and will continue to remember them. Let your child learn to be a winner and not a competitor.

And then for teachers and school owners, I think it’s time we changed our teaching methods. Enough with teaching without aid; enough with asking students/pupils to keep repeating what you said until they cram it; enough with spending time to teach on making the students copy voluminous notes so that it will look as if you were very industrious. We all are paying the price of past mistakes; it’s time to make a change.