'Govt to set up import mgmt system for IT hardware soon'

India will introduce an import management system to permit the import of laptops, servers and other IT hardware products from trusted jurisdictions, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, minister of electronics and IT, said. Imports from non-trusted jurisdictions—read China—will be limited to a certain number of units. The framework, expected to be put in place this month, aims to exit the ‘non-sustainable’ model of relying on imports, the minister said in an interview. Edited excerpts:

- Gulveen Aulakh

What has the government communicated to companies importing IT hardware products?

IT hardware—the broader server and laptop market—is increasingly powering the growth of digitization of our economy, Internet and cloud in India. Currently, it is extraordinarily dependent on supply chains that are import-intensive, and within that, it is extraordinarily dependent on one geography. That is not a sustainable model for the Indian government. So, we’ve said two changes we need to see to the broader supply chain; there has to be a larger domestic component of it, and if there is an import component, it has to be from a trusted source. We want to build trust into the DNA of all policymaking of the underlying internet, and the digital ecosystem that sits on it. We don’t want to face the problems that countries in the West are today facing, having invested in equipment from certain countries and now to pull back. The cloud in India is going to be 25-30 times what it is today in the next two to three years. There will be huge demand for data centres and servers. We are saying do more domestic sourcing of that supply chain and if you do it, also make sure that we will scrutinize where you’re bringing it from. So, to address both these goals we will put an import management system, which also has a third goal, of not disrupting any transition from the current model. We want to make it orderly.