DoT identifies & notifies products for revised, stricter public procurement norms
Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has identified and notified the products on which the revised and more stringent public procurement norms will be applied, as the government steps up its intent to push up local value addition.
The DoT has identified 36 products such as routers, ethernet switches, media gateways, customer premises equipment, GPON equipment etc, where the minimum local content has to be over 50%. On certain products, the minimum local content has to be 65%.
The stakeholders including telecom operators, manufacturers etc can provide their comments within 15 days on the draft notification.
The revised norms will be applicable in respect of the procurement made by all attached or subordinate offices or autonomous bodies under the Government of India including state-run companies and the states and local bodies making procurement under all Central schemes or schemes where the funding is provided by Centre, either full or partial. The norms will also be applicable in respect of projects wherein funding of goods, services or works is by the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF).
Further tightening the norms and pushing Make in India, the government in July this year had excluded the imported items sourced locally from resellers, distributors etc from the calculation of local content. Apart from that, royalties, technical charges paid out of India, and supply of repackaged and refurbished goods was excluded from the calculation of local content as per the order issued by the Department of
