‘India could allow global firms to avail incentives under DLI’
GANDHINAGAR : The Union government is evaluating a proposal to include large multinational companies in India’s $200 million design-linked incentive (DLI) scheme if they were designing chips in the country, said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, minister of state for electronics and information technology (IT). The scheme is currently limited to startups. Under the scheme, seven startups have been given approvals for claiming incentives.
“One of the suggestions that has come up is that in the design and innovation side, not to limit it only to startups. If there’s a big Indian or foreign company that wants to do design and chip design in India, we should allow the future design scheme also to support them. So, I’m studying that," the minister said in an interview.
“As long as it is an original chip that is going to go into an application and the IP is Indian, we will look at supporting them financially," he added, clarifying that the government will not subsidize a foreign company’s design that was not being done locally. The scheme’s expansion would be applicable to foreign companies that are fabless design makers such as NXP Semiconductors NV, Qualcomm Technologies Inc., and others, as well as large India-based chip design companies. The DLI scheme aims to offer financial incentives as well as design infrastructure support across various stages of development and deployment of semiconductor designs for integrated circuits, chipsets, system on chips, systems & IP cores, and semiconductor-linked designs over five years.
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