New Delhi: The government on Tuesday approved 16 proposals for mobile production under the Production Based Incentive Scheme (PLI). Under the scheme, domestic and foreign companies will be given an incentive of Rs 11 thousand crore and in five years, mobiles worth Rs 10.5 lakh crore will be produced.
The Ministry of Information and Electronics has also approved proposals from foreign companies such as Foxconn Hanhai, Wistron, Pejatron, Samsung and Rising Star, Apple’s associate manufacturing companies with domestic companies such as Lava, Micromax, Dixon Technologies, UTL Neolinks and Optimus.
The scheme will provide 2 lakh direct jobs while indirectly 6 lakh jobs will be created. The government had received 23 proposals under the scheme, out of which 16 have been approved. The PLI scheme was listed in April 2020, with an incentive of 4 to 6 per cent.
Earlier, Telecom and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had said that it would provide incentives of 4-6% on incremental sales over the base year of 2019-20, and aimed at giving a flip to the government’s flagship Make-in-India programme and the recently launched Atmanirbhar Bharat.
The government also plans to select five Indian companies and five international giants for the scheme, and these would be positioned as the engines that would promote the growth of Indian mobile phone manufacturing not only within the country, but at the global level. This comes ahead of being a self-reliant initiative launched by the Narendra Modi government and to not be dependent on countries like China.
China has completely taken over the Indian market weakening the position of local mobile manufacturers. local players like Micromax, Karbonn, Intex and Lava have surrendered market share to Chinese companies like Xiaomi, Lava, Oppo, etc. Majority of the phones in the Rs 15,000 category are sold by Chinese companies, a category which was earlier dominated by Indian firms. As per Counterpoint, 75% of the mobile phones which are sold in India are under Rs 15,000.