The Government on Monday said this year would be the year of ‘made in India’ for the electronic manufacturing industry, as various projects that were announced last year would be implemented.
The Government said it was also working on a policy to promote domestic production of 25 high-priority electronic products that account for around 82 per cent of electronics consumption in India. The products include mobile phones, flat panel TVs, notebooks, desktops, tablets computers, digital camera and servers.
“It makes commercial and economic sense to make these products and components in India. If we are able to focus on these 20-25 products, there should be a substantial change in the electronics industry by December-end,” J. Satyanarayana, Secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), told reporters here.
He said after putting in place policies such as the National Policy on Electronics, and identifying notifications such as Electronic System Design and Manufacturing (ESDM) last year, it is now time to put these in place at the ground level so that India could become a hub for manufacturing electronic items.
“There are some strengths and weaknesses around the notifications, and we will consider adding some more points to our guidelines,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Indian Electronics and Semiconductor Association (IESA), Ernst & Young and Frost & Sullivan, released a report on the state of electronic products in India.
The report studied the top 25 products that account for 69 per cent of total electronics in the country and four components required for their production.
A major hurdle The report saw high finance costs as a major hurdle for production of these 25 imported products, followed by issues related to taxation, poor availability of components, poor infrastructure and marketing cost.
It said the top five product categories, including mobile phones (38.85 per cent), flat panel TVs (7.91 per cent), laptops (5.54 per cent) and desktops (4.39 per cent), alone account for 60 per cent of the overall electronics consumption in India.
It suggested providing subsidies or low-interest loans to address working capital issues for small and medium manufacturers.
“Higher finance cost is a big challenge. With the Electronics Development Fund, some research and development fund can be reduced. Companies the world over 4-5 per cent finance cost, but in India we have to pay 11-12 per cent interest,” Sanjeev Keskar, Chairman, IESA, said.