In late October Patently Apple posted a report titled "Apple Supplier Wistron has finalized the sale of their Indian iPhone Plant to the Tata Group." Then days later, Ming-Chi Kuo predicted that iPhone production in India would double due to the Tata Groups entry into Apple's supply chain.

Today we're learning that the Tata Group has plans to build one of India’s biggest iPhone assembly plants, tapping Apple Inc.’s ambitions to increase manufacturing in the South Asian country.

Tata wants to construct the factory in Hosur in the southern Tamil Nadu state. The facility will likely have about 20 assembly lines and employ 50,000 workers within two years. The goal is for the site to be operational in 12 to 18 months.

Apple is diversifying its operations away from China by working with assembly and component manufacturing partners in India, Thailand, Malaysia and elsewhere.

The Tata Group has accelerated hiring at its existing facility in Hosur, where it produces iPhone metal casings. Tata has also said it’ll launch 100 retail stores focused on Apple products throughout India. For its part, Apple has opened two stores in the nation and is planning three more.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s production-linked subsidies have spurred Apple’s key suppliers such as Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group and Pegatron Corp. to ramp up in India. That helped Apple assemble more than $7 billion of iPhones in India in the previous fiscal year, increasing the country’s share of the device’s production to about 7%. The rest are assembled in China, which until a few years ago made all of them.

The new plant is set to be mid-sized among iPhone factories globally. It would likely be bigger than the one Tata acquired from Wistron, which employs more than 10,000 people, and smaller than Foxconn’s biggest China facilities that employ hundreds of thousands. For more, read the full Bloomberg report.