We need to first Design in India

Ajai Chowdhry, Founder of HCL and Chairman - Board of Governors, IIT - Patna, takes a detailed stock of Make in India, it's strengths, weaknesses and the path ahead. Edited excerpts from the video interview...

- Sunil Rajguru

ON THE GOVERNMENT'S PERFORMANCE LINKED INCENTIVE (PLI) SCHEMES...

The schemes on their own are excellent. They are serving the purpose for which they were created, which is increasing electronics manufacturing in India in different areas. They all started with phones and then want to components, then on to IT hardware, etc and recently semiconductors also. All of them are designed towards creating more manufacturing in India. So that objective gets served.

What is not happening and that is the area that is now getting the attention of the government as I read from the semiconductor policy is that we need to have more value addition in India. If we continue to just manufacture with 5-10% value addition and give away large amounts of incentives for low value addition, then we will not achieve our objective. One of the things that we have trying to impress on the government is to introduce schemes where design comes to the centre.

Fortunately, in the semiconductor policy, they have not just announced a design-led incentive, but they have also specifically mentioned that to help the growth of the industry, they will aggregate the government demand for semiconductors. I think that's a huge breakthrough as far as we are concerned. This is something that I have been telling the government for a while. Use the power of your large government demand to create industry. This is something that they have added to the semiconductors. I would like to see this happen in every area.

BRINGING BACK INDIAN BRANDS...

Secondly, design should become the centre of it all. If you want to manufacture semiconductors in India, who will give you the business today? All products in India in the last 10 years are not made in India in electronics. Pretty much every product is made either in China or in the US or South Korea. How many brands of India have vanished in the last 10-15 years?