India's electronic exports touched 16 billion in 2022: Rajeev Chandrasekhar

India's electronic exports nearly tripled from $5.8 billion to $16 billion between 2015 and 2022

India's electronic exports have nearly tripled between 2015 and 2022 -- from $5.8 billion to $16 billion, Minister of State for IT and Electronics, Rajeev Chandrasekhar said here on Monday.

During the period between 2014 to 2020 (pre-Covid), electronics manufacturing grew almost 250 per cent in India. To further catalyse this momentum, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a series of PLI schemes with incentives of $20 billion that have created significant expansion of investments, units and jobs in the sector," said Chandrasekhar during the launched of a report by the India Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), in collaboration with India Cellular and Electronics Association (ICEA), in the capital.

India is today the world's second largest manufacturer of mobile phones in the world.

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The 'Atmanirbhar Bharat' economic policies, with a focus on 'local for global' have set ambitious goals for electronics manufacturing of $300 billion, including exports of $120 billion by 2025-26, up from the current $75 billion.

Achieving the scale of exports and production will not only help the sector to grow domestically, but also meet the goal of the government's 'Make in India for the World' programme and achieve the target of a trillion-dollar digital economy by 2025-26, the minister said.

According to the report, titled 'Globalise to Localise', India should relentlessly focus on achieving global scale in exports with a short-term target of at least $30 billion.

This calls for temporarily easing localisation requirements, lowering custom duties and accelerating integration through free trade agreements (FTAs).

"The second phase should focus on increasing Domestic Value Addition (DVA) through creation of a competitive domestic ecosystem of ancillary suppliers," the report mentioned.

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"The study finds that China and Vietnam have adopted the mantra of afirst globalise, then localize', which means in the initial years they were determined to achieve global scale in exports, and then shifted their emphasis to greater use of local contents," said Dr Deepak Mishra, Director and CE of ICRIER.

According to Pankaj Mohindroo, Chairman of ICEA, the country has resurrected this industry after near total collapse in 2014.

"As a first step, we used PMP to build a $36 billion mobile industry. We are now pushing for global exports via PLI and a total production of $300 billion. With exports as our key focus, we are working on policies that will increase domestic value addition over the next few years. The world is looking to us to deliver on our potential," said Mohindroo.