Rajeev Chandrasekhar to hold meetings with top electronics, IT hardware makers

Minister of state for electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar will hold a series of one-on-one meetings with leading consumer electronics and IT hardware makers including Apple, Samsung, Dell, HP, Foxconn, Cisco, Lava, Micromax and Dixon starting this week to discuss their expansion plans to make the PLI scheme bring more impactful. About 16 selected firms are expected to have these individual meetings that will focus on their investments in the country and the hurdles they face, people aware of the development said.

The companies are entwined with the production-linked incentive (PLI) schemes for handsets and IT hardware, which are key to the government’s blueprint to boost local manufacturing by getting global players to establish factories here.

The meetings, scheduled from this week onwards, come on the back of a few interactions Chandrasekhar had with industry bodies. In the meetings, IT hardware firms are expected to urge the minister to make the PLI scheme more attractive. The industry has sought increasing the incentive rate under the scheme to 5% from the current average of 2.3% annually and expanding the span of the scheme to eight years from four now.

The newly appointed minister has held scores of meetings with different industry bodies as well as chiefs of top technology companies, including Ajit Mohan, Vice President and Managing Director of Facebook India, and Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairperson of Bharti Airtel.

Chandrasekhar also met industry bodies such as information and communications technology (ICT) sector’s MAIT, Electronic Industries Association of India (Elcina), India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA), and Indian Printed Circuits Association (IPCA).

Representatives of Amazon had met Chandrasekhar last week where they presented Amazon’s Fire TV Stick manufactured in India to the minister. Twitter’s global and India public policy teams including its policy chief Vijaya Gadde had also met the minister last week. So did Banmali Agarwala, President, Infrastructure, Defence and Aerospace and Global Corporate Affairs, at Tata Sons.