Special packages for high tech industries soon: Maran

Hyderabad, Jun 7 (UNI) The UPA government will soon come out with a special package of incentives to give a major boost to Electronics/IT Hardware manufacturing sector and make India a preferred destination for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), Union Minister of Communications and Information Technology Dayanidhi Maran said today.

Speaking after laying the foundation stone for SemIndia Fab Private Limited, he said a draft policy had already been prepared considering the requests of the investors.

He said a special package of incentives to promote and sustain this high-tech inudstry would be formulated.

Mr Maran said the UPA government's emphasis was not only to encourage the semiconductor fab and other high-tech industries but also the Electronics/IT Hardware manufacturing industries in the country, which were passing through a critical phase as a result of implementation of IT agreements and facing the challenge of Zero duty regime.

''Ever since I took over as Minister I had a vision to make India a major hub for hardware manufacturing. I realised that without a Semiconductor manufacturing base, this would not be possible'', he added.

He said India was ranked as the third largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity. ''A recent study by Frost and Sullivan had projected that the demand for electronic consumption would touch US $ 350 billion by 2015. This would mean that India had to import more than 40 billion dollars of semiconductor components." "Hence we are taking active setps to establish core component supply to the emerging Electronic Manufacturing Service (EMS) companies such as Nokia, Motorola, LG, Flexitronics, Solectron. I am happy to inform you that all these global companies had established maufacturing centers in India in the last two years under leadership of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and AICC President Sonia Gandhi '', he added.

Mr Maran said once the component industry was established, more than 9 million new jobs were expected to be created in the high technology manufacturing sector. In the last one year his Ministry had taken several important policy initiatives to encourage hi-tech manufacturing bases in India.

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