India Boosting IT & Electronics Sector : Saurabh Gaur
The Coronavirus pandemic has turned out to be an eyeopener for the government, projecting the importance of technology. The government of India has also been proactive at their end. It launched various schemes and programmes to boost the country’s IT and Electronics Sector. Highlighting the facts, Saurabh Gaur, IAS, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), interacted in an exclusive interview with Arpit Gupta of Elets News Network (ENN)
Q. What has been the impact of COVID-19 on the Indian IT and Electronics sector? What mitigation measures are being undertaken?
We know that domestic electronics manufacturing in the country has increased substantially over the last few years. However, domestic value addition continues to be low in the range of 10–20 percent only, which is due to the lack of electronic components manufacturing ecosystem and which is responsible for our excessive dependence on imports. India imports almost US$ 58 billion worth of electronic equipment, assemblies, components and raw materials every year.
While we are steadily moving from Semi Knocked Down (SKD) to Completely Knocked Down (CKD) level of manufacturing, the pandemic of COVID-19 has halted the process to a large extent as the supply chain is controlled by few economies of the world.
MSMEs are the most affected and bearing the brunt of the disruption in supplies caused due to the COVID-19 since they have limited resources and generally do not have many suppliers or alternative sources.
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There are some short-term measures taken by the Government to respond to the immediate challenge. This includes promoting flexible working arrangements, helping in inter-state movement of the essential electronic goods, helping industry in their Business continuity plan and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for the opening of their factory/plant.
You will be happy to know that, apart from the short-term measures taken by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the Government has come up with the trilogy of schemes including Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme for Large Scale Electronics Manufacturing, Scheme for Promotion of Manufacturing of Electronic Components and Semiconductors (SPECS), and modified Electronics Manufacturing Clusters (EMC 2.0) scheme to give momentum to electronic manufacturing in the country.
To read More: https://egov.eletsonline.com/2020/07/india-boosting-it-electronics-sector-saurabh-gaur/
