The Indian Solar Manufacturing Association and KPMG have called on the Government to provide support to domestic solar power equipment manufacturers.

The two have drawn a similarity between solar manufacturing and the electronics manufacturing industry and recommended that the Government aid be provided to solar manufacturers, in a study released on Thursday.

“The country imports over $30 billion of electronic goods annually making it the fourth largest item in import basket contributing to 23 per cent of trade deficit. This situation could have been prevented, if the electronics industry was supported during the nascent stage,” the ISMA-KPMG study points out.

Suggested sops

ISMA’s President Ashwani Sehgal said in a statement that like China, Japan and the US, India too should give incentives such as reduced interest, credit guarantees, capital subsidies, tax holidays, anti-dumping measures and preferential domestic procurement to domestic manufacturers.

“Indian solar manufacturing is competitive but suffers due to lack of incentives that are provided to other nations.

Forty per cent of Indian solar producers have shut down with the industry utilisation at just 21 per cent,” Sehgal said.

The study states thatsustainable domestic manufacturing for solar power equipment can help save $42 billion of equipment imports, create 50,000 direct jobs and 125,000 indirect jobs as India is estimated to install 100 GW of solar capacity by 2030.

“Supporting domestic manufacturing industry could result in moderately higher price of solar power in the short run but the cost curve would fall in the medium term as scale and supply chains develop,” said Santosh Kamath, Head of Renewable Energy at KPMG.

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