Govt receives proposals worth Rs 1,20,000 cr for electronics manufacturing

The government has received proposals worth Rs 1,20,294 crore for electronics manufacturing till the end of Feburary this year.

The ministry for communications and IT had received proposals for Rs 11,800 crore till June 2014. "Due to the initiatives taken up in the last Budget, especially duty rationalisation, we have noticed a remarkable acceleration in the field of electronics manufacturing. In this connection, mobile manufacturing presents a very encouraging area," Minister of Communications and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad said. Proposals worth Rs 18,000 crore have been approved till now, he said.

Also, in 2014-15, 54 million mobile units were assembled and manufactured in the country, which has more than doubled to 110 million units in 2015-16. "After the duty rationalisation in the last budget, 16 new mobile manufacturing units have been set up in this financial year," Prasad said.

The proposal of duty advantage of 8.5 per cent to domestic manufacturers of routers, broadband modems and set top boxes, digital video recorder and CCTV cameras among other products announced in the Union Budget, will give a boost to the telecom sector, which uses many of these products.

Domestic value addition in mobile phones, battery, wired headsets, speakers would enjoy a duty advantage of 10.5 per cent compared to imported goods, he added.

On IT and IT-enabled services, the minister said that India's share in the global IT outsourcing has increased to 56 per cent, while the services export has crossed $100 billion in the last 20 months.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) equity inflow in telecom sector has touched a new high in FY 2014-15 at $2895 million, which is 80 per cent more than the FDI equity inflow in 2012-13 at $304 million.

On the postal department, he said 1000 ATMs will be installed by March 2016, out of which 576 ATMs have already been installed."India Post has overtaken the State Bank of India to become the largest core banking network with 18,231 branches," he added.

Regarding the BharatNet project, Prasad said at the end of February, optic fibre cable (OFC) pipe has been laid in 51,616 gram panchayats while fibre has been laid in 41,086 gram panchayats. On the use of the Aadhaar platform for delivery of services, Prasad said "this will prevent leakages by identifying beneficiaries correctly and would encourage good governance."