Trai floats paper on equipment production

Aiming to promote the telecom equipment manufacturing industry in the country, Trai on Monday floated a consultation paper through which it wants to deliberate on issues impacting the sector and explore ways to boost FDI and bring down exports.

“The present consultation paper has therefore been aimed to realistically assess India’s true potential in equipment manufacturing with the aim to arrive at recommendations that would enable Indian telecom industry to transition from an import-dependent industry to a global hub for manufacturing,” Trai said.

Even as the mobile handset manufacturing industry has shown good progress in the last five years, same cannot be said for telecom equipment manufacturing, Trai said, adding that while a liberal trade policy enabling import of telecom equipment with low or no duty has kept both service providers and consumers happy, the lack of capacity building for domestic production poses a serious challenge to India’s continued success.