Trai bats for homemade telecom equipment

Issues paper to identify policy and incentives, aims to beat security threat from foreign goods

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has suggested manufacturing telecom equipment in the country to offset security concerns because of excessive reliance on foreign-made goods. It has issued a paper to identify policy measures, address issues of standardisation, and noted incentives that can be given to industry.

Titled “Promoting local telecom equipment manufacturing”, Trai’s paper claims there has been exponential growth in technology in the telecom sector. “While the mobile handset manufacturing industry has shown good progress in the past five years, the telecom equipment manufacturing industry has not been able to match the performance.”

The regulator said a liberal trade policy enabling import of telecom equipment with low or no duty has kept both service providers and consumers happy, but the lack of capacity building for domestic production posed a serious challenge to India’s continued success in the telecom sector. “Apart from economic reasons, the security concerns arising out of excessive reliance on foreign manufactured products also suggest that India should aim at achieving self-sufficiency,” Trai said.

According to reports, over 90 per cent of the demand of telecom equipment in India was met through imports in 2013-14. One of the primary reasons for increasing imports and decreasing exports is the relentless competition from China, which is known for large-scale production and export of low-cost telecom equipment, besides imports from other countries such as Sweden, Finland and the US.

Trai said it aims to assess India’s true potential in equipment manufacturing, with the aim of providing recommendations that would enable Indian telecom industry to transition from an import-dependent industry to a global hub for manufacturing.

With the paper, it aims to identify policy measures required to boost innovation and productivity of local telecom manufacturing, and examine the existing patent laws in context of promoting local manufacturers.

Trai will also examine the issues of standardisation, certification, and testing of telecom equipment; then it will suggest a framework for improvement to support local telecom equipment manufacturing.

Also, issues related to IPR, affecting the local telecom equipment manufacturing industry, will also be looked at.

The authority will identify if the current fiscal incentives to promote the local telecom manufacturing are enough and recommend measures for implementation in the future. Stakeholders can send their comments by October 16 and counter-comments by October 30.