Flex, Cisco, Ciena, Nokia , Samsung, Foxconn and Ericsson, which want to finalise their local manufacturing plans under the telecom equipment production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme, are scared that they will lose out on four months while waiting for approvals and the detailed instructions.
The scheme started its course on April 1 but the organisations don’t expect the approval letters to come before the month of July, with the whole process of selection and disbursement of final clearances to take time, executives at three of the organizations stated.
Moreover, a senior Department of Telecommunications official told , in an article , to Economic Times, that the basic incentive structure and names of interested companies have been announced already.
“The guidelines are also in the final stages and will be released shortly. The workings of the department had been halted in the past weeks due to the severe Covid spread,” the official mentioned.
The official did not pass any comments on the concerns of organisations over missing out on production goals.
“The final guidelines are important for us to understand the business case and make a production commitment,” one executive mentioned. “We believe production will not start for another quarter given the poor state of manufacturing operations across sectors.”
DoT announced that the PLI for local manufacture of telecom equipment and network hardware in February, with Rs 12,195 crore to be disbursed around five years and incentives ranging from 4% to 6% of incremental production in a year.
The scheme provides a higher amount of incentive upto 4%-7% to micro, small and medium enterprises that must invest Rs 10 crore, while large organisations have an investment capacity of Rs 100 crore.
The scheme will cover products like 4G/5G next-generation radio access networks, IoT devices, customer .
