After achieving success in domestic manufacturing of global electronics products like iPhones, the government is now working on a component-linked incentive scheme to make India both a product nation as well as a component-producing destination.
The component-linked incentive scheme will encourage the production of electronics parts besides semiconductors, ministry of electronics and IT secretary S Krishnan, said on Tuesday.
‘We are looking to work towards two aspects – one is on designing products in India, owning the IP (intellectual property) in India…and the second is to increase the number of components, which will get manufactured in India,’ Krishnan said at the launch of the country’s first designed in India, artificial intelligence-enabled education tablet.
Krishnan said that while there are big targets of increasing the overall electronics exports from the country, as exports go up, imports will also go up simply because the value addition which happens in the country is still limited, and a significant portion is imported, assembled and then re-exported or used for domestic consumption.
Analysts said that while production-linked incentive schemes for smartphones, consumer electronics, IT and telecom will yield results in terms of domestic manufacturing as well as increasing exports, unless there’s a similar scheme for electronics components, trade deficit will continue to widen.
Countries like China, Thailand, and Vietnam, which are competing economies for India as far as electronics trade is concerned and where most of the component manufacturers are located, have trade surplus.
‘The only way to check trade deficit in electronics is to increase domestic value addition and that can happen when more and more components start getting manufactured domestically. This can only happen if a suitable incentive scheme with the right incentives is put in place,’ industry executives told FE.
Meanwhile, the made and designed in India 4G education tablet, developed by non-profit organisation EPIC Foundation, was launched on Tuesday. It will be produced locally by electronic manufacturing services company VVDN and JioPhone maker United Telecoms (UTL).
It will be available for retail, both offline as well as e-commerce websites at a price of `9,900. Further, the major target market for the tablets will be the government tenders as well as citizen service centres to bridge digital divide in rural India.
The 8-inch display tablet is powered by MediaTek MT8766A processor, and runs on Android 13 support. It supports 4G LTE network, has a 5100 mAh battery, and comes in variants with a storage of 32 GB and 64 GB.
The tablet has a 3 megapixel front camera and 8 megapixel back camera. Its key feature is integration with BharatGPT’s conversational AI feature specific to education content such as those from NCERT books. BharatGPT is a generative AI product of Bengaluru-based CoRover.ai.
‘We want to build products in such a way that the components are easily replaceable and upgradable. So, we have designed a product to stay on for four to five years,’ said Ajai Chowdhury, chairman of EPIC Foundation and co-founder of HCL.
