Indian telecom manufacturers are set to get incentives as the government has set an ambitious target of meeting 80% of local requirement by 2020 by promoting the domestic production.
"Important milestone is to promote the domestic production of telecommunication equipment.... To meet 80% of the Indian telecom sector demand through domestic manufacturing with value addition of 65% by 2020," Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal said while unveiling the draft of new National Telecom Policy.
The domestic demand is estimated to be of the order of Rs 2,50,000 crore by the end of 12th Five-Year Plan (2012-2017), the Minister said.
The new policy has proposed to create a corpus to promote indigenous research and development, creation of intellectual property right, entrepreneurship, manufacturing, commercialisation and deployment of state-of-art telecom products and services during the 12th Five Year Plan Period.
To address the strategic and security concerns of the country, Sibal said the government will provide preferential market access for domestically produced telecommunication products, including mobile devices, SIM cards etc. The government will a special emphasis on domestically-made products for which intellectual property rights reside in India.
"This should be consistent with international commitments," Sibal said.
Also Read
Under the new telecom policy, the government will promote setting up of Telecommunications Standard Development Organisation as an autonomous body with strong participation of
the industry, R&D centres, service providers and academia to drive consensus regarding national requirement.
The government will incentives telecom service providers to use indigenous products by encouraging commitment to purchase Indian products, participate in trials of newly created Indian Products, fund and support creation of Indian IPRs.
According to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, only 12-13% of all the locally made products, produced with the aid of foreign vendors in 2009-10, were used in the sector. However, purely India-made products formed just three% of the total market. The Indian telecom sector is largely dependent on imports.
The new policy has also proposed providing soft credit (loans at low rate of interest) to Indian product manufacturers for domestic deployment and exports.
The Department of Telecommunications has placed draft of the National Telecom Policy, 2011 on its website for public comments and the government will announce the final policy in December this year after considering comments received from public, Minister said.