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The Government will hard sell the proposed National Policy on Electronics to foreign investors to set up manufacturing facilities in India. As part of this, the Government plans to conduct road shows abroad to get multinational companies interested.
The Cabinet recently approved two schemes to encourage electronic manufacturing, including Electronics Manufacturing Clusters and Modified Special Incentive Package (M-SIPS).
“Formulating this policy is one thing. Articulating, showcasing, marketing and attracting foreign direct investment and domestic investors are the need of the hour,” Mr J. Satyanarayana, Secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), told reporters here.
Marketing strategy
He said the DeitY would create a marketing strategy soon, which would include road-shows, international seminars and visits to some of the major companies that have plans for India.
“They are all on the anvil now and in end August or early September, the Minister (Mr Kapil Sibal) has agreed to lead a delegation to Germany where a major event is going to take place. It would be followed by a series of visits, maybe to Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the US and explain these things on a one-to-one basis (to companies),” he said.
Mr Satyanarayana said the idea is to cover as much of the sector as possible by creating competencies. For example, in a cluster or nearby cluster, there will be a set of products which are related to each other so that there is synergy in terms of logistics, transport and packaging.
It would also help in defining a cluster for a particular type of products or components in the next five years. This would be similar to automobile industry where certain places like Manesar in Haryana and Chakan in Maharashtra have become manufacturing hubs.
“How to identify products or items is one of the criteria that we are working on right now. We have sent drafts to relevant ministries such as of Commerce and Telecom,” he said.
That would give the correct message to investors to see right signals on what is required for the industry, once the Policy comes out, he said.
He said the Government has kept some thresholds for each type of products, where in, it would give subsidies of 20 per cent to special economic zones (SEZs) and 25 per cent to non-SEZs to the investors under the M-SIPS scheme.
For instance, there is cap of minimum investment for semi-conductor wafers companies at Rs 1,000 crore, memory chips Rs 400 crore, nano electronics Rs 200 crore and solar photovoltaic, Rs 650 crore.
The Government has already approved Rs 10,000 crore for this scheme in the 12th Five-Year Plan.
On human resource, Mr Satyanarayana said DeitY with its consortium of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing and National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology, would train 14,000 people over the next three years in centres across Aurangabad, Chennai and Hyderabad.
It would also work with National Skill Development Corporation for getting people to the IT hardware and electronics industry, he added.
The projected requirement is to reach 28 million people by 2020 for generating revenue of $ 400 billion from the industry.
>ronendrasingh.s@thehindu.co.in
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