Majority of manufacturers qualified under the revised production-linked incentive scheme for IT hardware are expected to start production this year, a senior government official said Friday.
“About 17 out of 27 PLI companies will start production from this year. Around 6-7 of them started production last year, and two have plans to start from next year,” said Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) secretary S Krishnan on the sidelines of the inauguration of Netweb Technologies’ new high-end computing server manufacturing facility in Faridabad, Haryana.
“The process has already commenced. We have been periodically reviewing the progress in the IT hardware PLI and we are quite satisfied with the way it has progressed,” the official said, adding that the government is still awaiting for companies to audit their production before giving out the incentives promised under the scheme.
The government had approved the application of 27 companies, including HP, Dell, Flextronics, Lava International, Lenovo, Netweb Technologies, under a revised PLI scheme for IT hardware that offers higher incentives and includes a localisation schedule.
The secretary also said that domestic companies will get preference in the government’s Rs 10,372 crore India AI Mission that was announced to encourage the development of artificial intelligence models and applications in India.
“The AI mission doesn’t involve manufacturing so much. It is about providing access to GPU (graphics processing unit) resources, so of course, wherever possible, domestic providers will get preference, but we will have to work on that,” Krishnan said.
The official added that government agencies procure more than 50% of the high-performance computers manufactured in India.
“For various reasons including stability and others, it is important that we have domestic capacity, which has been useful in establishing this is a manufacturing exercise that can take place in India, by an Indian company,” Krishnan said, adding that the country now needs to increase the domestic value addition, which has been addressed in the IT Hardware PLI scheme.
