Indian hardware policy to address infrastructure issues

Following the success of India's semiconductor policy, the government of India is well on its way to announce a new hardware manufacturing policy, hopefully sometime this month.

According to M. Madhavan Nambiar, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Department of Information Technology, the hardware policy should be coming shortly, where, the government is looking to address infrastructure related issues.

Speaking with him on the sidelines of the Thought Leader Series organized by the India Semiconductor Association (ISA), he said the hardware policy would still take some time. "As a part of it, we are looking at IT investment regions." These would be set up in 40km areas, and each region would be an entire ecosystem in itself.

Nambiar added: "We are also looking at very good public-private partnerships. We have to develop the manpower." The Department is working with the Labour Ministry and other organizations in order to set up skill development units. It is necessary for skiils to keep pace with technology.

The to-be-announced hardware policy will also be looking at taxes, etc. "It is a recommendation that we are making," he said. "For India to be able to attract investments, we nust ensure that we are the best in class."

Touching upon the semiconductor policy, he said it was important that this policy was pro-active and friendly. "We need to see how best to provide comfort levels to those investing," Nambiar said.

It was necessary to have a strong semiconductor industry in India, as all leading countries, such as the USA, China, Taiwan and Japan had equally strong semiconductor industries. There has since been lot of interest in fabs and ecosystem units, and some of those were in the process of being set up.