India will have an increased budget of $100 billion dollars from the current $30 billion dollars for the use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in manufacturing sector in India in 2020. “We need to find out how to spend this money on using ICT for improving different sectors of domestic manufacturing in India,” said J Satyanarayana, Secretary IT, Department of Electronics and IT (DeitY).

While delivering his address at a conference, titled ‘accelerating domestic technology adoption to drive growth’, organized by FICCI today, Satyanarayana said that productivity enhancement of up to five to 10 per cent is possible in the textile-manufacturing sector with the use of ICT. He added that around 1,000 artisans at present use the special designing software developed by C-DAC to increase their design efficiency.

“There are around 4.5 crore retailers in India but all of them are using conventional methods for accounting, supply chain and inventory keeping. This needs to change,” said Satyanarayana. The secretary said that a number of enabling factors for IT intervention in domestic manufacturing were needed. Some of the important ones are a common platform for different industry segments, which could be cloud based to provide pay per use facility; a local language interface; affordability and awareness and capacity building.

“We also really need an inward looking ICT industry which can provide a policy driven environment for ICT in manufacturing,” he said.

Satyanarayana said that both products and demand are available; the need now is for them to meet. He also asked the industry to provide data about the number of citizens they affect through their ICT services everyday, on the lines of the government developed ‘e-taal’. “I challenge the industry to develop a similar portal so that people can know how the industry touches the lives of common people,” he said.

One should note that by enabling the use of electronic products in domestic manufacturing such as smart electricity metres for recording electricity metres homes would also drive the electronics hardware manufacturing industry in India, something the government is very keen on at present.

High demand of products is expected to considerably engage the private sector in the electronics hardware manufacturing industry. Indian electronics is not a very robust industry mostly due to discouraging policies of the government, such as complex duty and tax structure among others.