India aims to beat China in mobile manufacturing: Ravi Shankar Prasad

Union Telecom and IT minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad has said that India is aiming to surpass China in the field of mobile manufacturing. According to Prasad, the government is extremely serious about making India a hub of other electronic products. In an annual general meeting of industry chamber FICCI, the minister said, "We wanted India to become the second largest mobile manufacturer in the world. Now I am pushing India to surpass China. That's my goal and I am very clearly defining it".

In June, this year, Prasad formally launched three schemes to promote domestic electronic manufacturing, especially mobile manufacturing,in the country.  The three schemes include production-linked incentives (PLI), promotion of components and semiconductors manufacturing, and setting up of clusters.

Under these schemes, the eligible companies can get sops of around Rs 48,000 crore. The government has cleared 16 proposals from domestic and international companies entailing an investment of Rs 11,000 crore under the PLI scheme to manufacture mobile phones worth Rs 10.5 lakh crore over the next five years.

The companies include iPhone maker Apple's contract manufacturers Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron, Samsung, and Rising Star. Domestic companies whose proposals have been approved include Lava, Bhagwati (Micromax), Padget Electronics (Dixon Technologies), UTL Neolyncs and Optiemus.

As per the telecom ministry, domestic mobile device manufacturing is the largest segment among all electronic manufacturing in the country that stood at $70 billion in 2018-19. Mobile manufacturing has jumped from $2.9 billion in 2014-15 to $24.3 billion in 2018-19, registering a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 70 per cent.

In these years, India has been able to ramp up its mobile manufacturing capabilities from six crore devices (valued at $3 billion) in 2014 to 29 crore (valued at $30 billion) in 2019. The government now intends to make mobile phones the largest exported item.

The National Policy on Electronics 2019 (NPE) envisages electronic manufacturing turnover of more than Rs 26 lakh crore by 2025, out of which Rs 13 lakh crore is expected to come from the mobile phone segment.

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