The draft national policy on electronics unveiled by the Communications and IT Ministry proposes creation of a “Electronic Development Fund” to promote innovation and R&D in the electronics systems design and manufacturing space.
The draft policy has also talked of setting up incubation centres and a specialised institute for chip design in the country. Centres of Excellence in areas of automotive electronics, avionics and industrial electronics have also been proposed in the policy outline.
“The bulk of the fund deployment will go towards R&D but also towards incubation, and venture support in partnership with others. The size of the fund under consideration is about Rs 5,000 crore. But this is the notional amount since it will be drawn down as and when investment proposals are taken up,” a senior official of the Ministry said.
Public feedback
For now, the Ministry has invited public feedback on the draft policy statement over the next one month. Incidentally, the policy boost will also result in Department of IT being renamed as Department of Electronics and IT.
It also entails “providing assistance” for setting up of greenfield clusters and up-gradation of brownfield clusters. The benefits of National Manufacturing Policy and National Investment and Manufacturing Zones will be available to these clusters, it says.
To promote exports, it proposes that any sale of zero duty electronics products in the domestic area will be considered as physical exports and all the benefits of exports scheme will be available for such transactions.
This means that benefits which could be available include rebating of import duty suffered on the inputs that go into manufacture of the product sold in the DTA.
Interestingly, it also talks of creating incentives for relocation to India, of electronics hardware manufacturing units facing cost pressures in developed countries. But does not provide details at this point.
HR side
On the HR side, it wants to support creation of capacities within academic institutions to enhance the production of adequate number of PhDs and post graduates for supporting the growth of chip design and embedded software and hardware design industries.
It is aiming for 2,500 PhDs annually by 2020.