Govt to give local edge to electronic hardware cos

18 May 2011 Evaluate

The government is considering a radical proposal to shore up electronic manufacturing capabilities in the country. Several ministries are firming up a plan to mandate that 30% (in value terms) of all electronic equipment procurement by the government should be Indian products or have a ‘Made in India’ tag. This will extend to tenders of all government ministries, public sector undertakings, government-controlled institutions, PPP-funded projects and projects under institutional funding from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.

The Department of Information Technology (DIT), which first mooted this proposal, has said its studies have shown that the ‘volume of electronic imports to India far exceeds the oil import bill’. The telecom sector will be the most impacted if this proposal is implemented, as it accounts for maximum import of electronic hardware. The communications ministry is of the view that this proposal can complement telecom regulator TRAI’s recent suggestion that mobile phone companies be mandated to source 80% of their network equipment and other related infrastructure from domestic
manufacturer’s by 2020.

TRAI’s proposal is likely to be cleared soon with some changes to the timelines. TRAI wants the government to ensure that companies owned by Indians and located here get 50% of all telecom network orders by 2020. This implies that the regulator wants the manufacturing arms of international vendors such as Ericsson, Nokia Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei, among others, to account for only 30% of all equipment orders by 2020. Besides, TRAI also wants telecom hardware imports to be restricted to 20% of the country’s total requirements. It had also charted out a timeline beginning 2015 to achieve these targets.

India is the world’s largest market for international vendors and TRAI has projected that the market for telecom equipment will double to $40 billion by 2020. Currently, locally manufactured telecom hardware accounts for a mere 12-13% of the mobile operators’ needs. Of this, Indian companies account for a mere 3%. But large sections of the industry are set to oppose this proposal.

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