Government looking at component-linked incentive scheme for electronic manufacturing
Feb 14, 2024
Synopsis
Secretary of MeitY makes this announcement at the launch of the country's first designed-in-India education tablet with BharatGPT virtual assistant.
The Secretary of MeitY, S Krishnan, said on Tuesday that the government is looking at launching a component-linked incentive scheme to make the country a “product nation”.
Based on the success of the production-linked incentive scheme for electronics, he said the government wants manufacturers to also start designing products in the country.
Krishnan made this announcement at the launch of a tablet that has been designed in India.
The device was launched in the capital by EPIC Foundation as the first AI-enabled education tablet designed and made in India. The tablet has a host of features and takes into account key aspects of repairability and upgradability to bridge the digital divide and the issue of e-waste that is rampant. Priced at Rs 9,999, the Milkyway tablet has been designed by Manesar-based VVDN Technologies in collaboration with MediaTek India and CoRover.ai. IRIS Global is the distribution partner.
VVDN Technologies aims to manufacture two-three lakh tablets for state governments. The devices are yet to be commercially manufactured, but an MoU for over 12,000 units has been inked with entities like IRIS Global and Vedavaag Systems Ltd.
The tablet boasts of being the first-of-its-kind product to be integrated with the BharatGPT virtual assistant. This highlights AI/ML-based inter-lingual translation for Indian languages (Voice-2-Voice, Text-2-Text) to support India’s language diversity and inclusion of differently-abled users.
Speaking at the launch, Ajai Chowdhry, Founder & Chairman, EPIC Foundation, said he expects this announcement to see more startups and electronic companies design products in India. “My vision is that all electronic manufacturing services (EMS) manufacturers in India should move to being original design manufacturers (ODMs) – they should not just stay as manufacturers because that is not where the value addition is, the value addition is in designing in India,” he stated.
Chowdhry also emphasised on how a taskforce has been set up now by MeitY to make India a hardware product nation.
Krishnan, the MeitY secretary, said they are looking to work towards two main aspects. “One is on designing products in India, owning the IP in India and making that happen. The second is to increase the number of components that will get manufactured. In addition to the semiconductor chips and in addition to what happens on the semiconductor side, we also expect that there should be all other components and an increasing proportion of which are made here,” he said.
Delving more on the electronics sector, Krishnan said that while we have targets to increase exports, a rise in exports also makes imports higher simply because the value addition that happens in the country is still limited, and a significant portion is imported, assembled and then re-exported or used for domestic consumption. “Clearly, increasing value addition in the sector is key and thereby the need for increasing the share of electronic component production in India. These are MeitY’s next goals, riding on the success of the large-scale electronics PLI which is the most successful PLI programme that the government has run in recent times,” he said.
Alluding to how the private sector is stepping up to take on the challenge, Krishan said that they hope to have a component-linked incentive scheme in MeitY in the coming months. “This will assist the movement of making India a product nation and increasingly a nation that produces more of its components,” he added.
Arjun Malhotra, Co-Founder, EPIC Foundation, also the need for getting component manufacturing into the country. “We have got a big enough market – we need products that are specific to India in certain areas. The multinationals are not going to make it because this is not their market, in some way we can force them to do it. HP did make a printer that was specific for India and they sold it in China too at some point, but they (the multinationals) will have to be forced to do it. It's not something that they tend to do on their own. We have to do it. We have to make those brands and take them overseas before that market gets taken away from us,” he added.
[The Economic Times]
