Senior government official, S Krishnan of MeitY, revealed a strategic shift towards bolstering electronics component manufacturing within India, aiming to introduce a new scheme to support this initiative. At the CII Electronic Summit, Krishnan highlighted the country’s achievement in meeting 99% of the local mobile phone market through domestic manufacturing, emphasizing the necessity for companies to focus on exporting, enhancing competitiveness, and augmenting value addition for future growth.
“If our competitiveness needs to keep getting better then the challenge really is to not just rely on about 10 to 15 per cent of the value addition to assembly units in the country but to look at what else we can do, how can we move up in the value chain?” Krishnan emphasized, stressing the need to advance up the value chain beyond assembly units.
Regarding the global landscape, Krishnan suggested that India should aim for around 35 to 40 per cent of the entire value chain, possibly mirroring China’s 40 to 45 per cent hold on the value chain in the electronic manufacturing domain.
The government, Krishnan mentioned, is actively developing a successor scheme to the Scheme for Promotion of Manufacturing of Electronic Components and Semiconductors (SPECS), following the implementation of SPECS 1.0. Krishnan emphasized, “We are working on next SPECS… That will be done after taking issues of electronics industry into consideration.”
Furthermore, Krishnan advocated for the local production of capital equipment required for electronics manufacturing, stressing the need to revise schemes for research and development promotion while seeking collaboration with the industry for these initiatives.
