Govt to launch Rs 10,000-cr fund for domestic electronic firms

The government plans to launch an electronics development fund soon, with a corpus of Rs 10,000 crore to provide financial assistance to firms for electronics manufacturing.

“It will be used to encourage innovation and support entrepreneurship,” J S Deepak, secretary, department of electronics and information technology (DeitY), said while speaking at the launch of Qualcomm's Design in India initiative.

The fund, housed with Canbank Venture Capital Fund, will start this month with an initial corpus of Rs 2,500 crore and the rest will be raised from various sources.

US-based chip maker Qualcomm announced $400,000 fund for development of electronic products by Indian entrepreneurs under its ‘Design in India’ programme in association with IT (information technology) industry body National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom).

The programme, started from Tuesday, will run till February 29 next year. Qualcomm will shortlist 10 entities which will be eligible for funding of $10,000 each to start prototyping their product idea at Qualcomm’s lab in Bengaluru. Subsequently, it will select three best products and give them funding of $100,000 each.

“The company creating a product under the ‘Design in India’ programme will own IPR (intellectual property rights) for it. We only want to boost the ecosystem for electronics design and commercialisation of innovative products,” Qualcomm India President Sunil Lalvani said.

Engineering export from India was around $18.1 billion in 2014-15. This is the fastest growing segment within the information technology industry and expected to reach $40 billion by 2020.

Nasscom President R Chandrashekhar said DeitY has also selected Nasscom to set up an incubation centre for developing an Internet of Things (IOT) ecosystem.

“The centre is coming up in Bengaluru with initial cost of Rs 25 crore to incubate ideas around IoT and encourage domestic entrepreneurship,” Chandrashekhar said.