The automotive sector is one of India’s largest and fastest growing manufacturing sectors. With a turnover of US$13 B, the automobile sector employs about 0.45 million people directly and 10 million people indirectly, including after-sales and servicing networks. This ranked India as the 11th largest passenger car producer in the world. In the category of motorcycles and scooters, India is ranked 1st and 2nd respectively. With India increasingly liberalizing its market place, many new joint ventures evolved, resulting in close to 2 dozen global auto manufacturers setting up shop in India

The auto component segment is equally robust, supplying the entire range of parts required by the domestic automobile industry and currently employs about 250,000 people. Although small by global standards, this segment is growing rapidly as a result of its low costs and rising quality. Sales turnover of parts is estimated to have reached US$8.7 B in 2004/05, 29% higher than the previous year. Noticeably, auto component manufacturers supply to two kinds of buyers – original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and the replacement market. Over 300 small and medium companies directly service the OEMs assembling vehicles in India. Downstream, close to 5,000 other micro firms are working for these Tier 1 suppliers, as well as for the replacement market

The sector can be segmented into 2. One is the automobile segment. The other is the auto parts segment. The key manufacturing areas for these 2 segments are well spread across the country.