Investment and innovation are the two major areas that need serious attention to address the present difficulties confronting the electronics industry in India, said J Satyaranayana, secretary, department of electronics and information technology (DeitY). He was speaking at CII-ICTE (information and communication technologies and electronics) conference on developing demand, manufacturing competitiveness and exports on Tuesday.

Stressing upon the need for investment, Satyanarayana said the lack of finance was holding up several projects. There is a need to convince banking sector, sensitize the investors abroad and build their confidence in the electronics sector to get investment, he said. At the same time, he emphasized, there was a pressing need for innovations in the sector. He said instead of a large number of items, the industry in India could identify about 10 products and build the ecosystem around them.

Satyanarayana said the government has cleared seven green field projects in different parts of the country for the sector, “but there are gaps that need to be closed in development of manufacturing infrastructure” for the electronics industry.

In his special address, Rajiv Arora, joint secretary, ministry of commerce and industry, expressed his ministry’s concern about India’s growing import bill in electronic items, next only to the oil import bill, to emphasise the need to move from mere assembling to manufacturing. For this, he said, the government was open to addressing the requirements of the industry in terms of tax regime, duties and the protection it required. For this, there is need for constant cross flow of information between the government and the industry, he said.

Earlier, Vinod Sharma, chairman of CII national committee on ICTE manufacturing and managing director Deki Electronics Ltd, said in his welcome speech that the conference was intended to look at the key issues facing the industry. He said while the size of the industry globally was immense, India’s share remains small and there was need to address this issue. He said while there has been much talk about the disabling factors that pull us down, there was also need to look at the advantages that we in India have.

Satish K Kaura, chairman and managing director of Samtel Group, speaking of the need for electronic hardware manufacturing, said the industry has not been able to make an impact and huge dependence on imports continues. He said one of the factors that pulled down the industry’s performance was exposing it to free market and free trade which made it vulnerable to much unfair competition and led to huge dumping of goods in India by foreign manufacturers. “We overlooked the fact that if you need to build indigenous industry, you need to support it. That is what all Asian countries have done,” he said.

He said he was happy to hear that the government was now serious about doing something to help the industry. He said the opening of the strategic and defence sector to private industry was a massive opportunity for electronic items, which constitute about 40% by value in the defence items, be it fighter planes or other platforms.

Sunil Vachani, chairman and managing director, Dixon Technologies (India) Pvt Ltd, said the one word that summarised the potential of the electronic industry was “Limitless”. Speaking of the problems posed by taxes and duties to manufacturers in India, Set-top Boxes’ inverted duty structure continues to be a major irritant in encouraging local manufacturing.

Talking about the impact of policy changes on certain demands, he highlighted the case of imposition of duty on baggage imports on LCD/LED TV, which has resulted in increasing the demand and local manufacturing of these products. The manufacturing of these items picked up by 30% despite the poor festive season this year. Talking about the need for quality and best practices, he said the Indian manufacturers need to “benchmark themselves against the best in the world” to compete against them.