Officials added that MeitY has sent the proposal to expand the incentives to the empowered group of secretaries and a series of meetings planned to assess progress of various PLIs
An expansion of the IT Hardware and wearables and hearables PLI seems to be on the cards as the ministry of IT and electronics (MeitY) is seeking an additional $3 Billion for increasing the incentive budget, as per a report by ET.
The report further added while citing a senior government official that about $2 billion of the sought-out funds wuld be allotted towards IT hardware while the remaining billion would be used for wearables and hearables, adding that the entire calculation was based on the target the country wished to achieve.
When the government had announced the policy in February this year, it had set an outlay of Rs 7,325 crore to achieve a total production of Rs 3.26 lakh crore.
Notably, MeitY envisages to capture at least 15 percent of the $350 billion global electronics market by 2026. This, as per the official, requires additonal funds to be allotted towards the PLIs.
Industry associations had expressed their dismay in the inadequacy of the current incentive structure to the government and have sought doubling of the incentive rate, which is at present 2.3 percent, and expanding the corpus to Rs 20,000 crore.
Officials added that MeitY has sent the proposal to expand the incentives to the empowered group of secretaries and a series of meetings planned to assess progress of various PLIs to see which ones have more potential and need more inputs.
The empowered group of secretaries, which will take a decision on the matter, comprises the cabinet secretary, the Niti Aayog CEO and secretaries from DPIIT, commerce, revenue, department of economic affairs and MeitY. The group of secretaries has the power to alter the scheme and the rate of incentive. Once ratified, the proposal will then be sent to the cabinet.
