Time ripe for next round of big reforms to attract manufacturers: Experts
India needs to raise its game quickly and look beyond production-linked incentive (PLI) schemes to establish itself as a global manufacturing powerhouse and create millions of new jobs, say experts. Time, they say, is ripe for the next wave of big-bang policy measures from the government to ensure that India's efforts to bring back local manufacturing in a big way pays off.
Some suggested steps include creating world-class, export-oriented industrial hubs (where India is a laggard), ringing in favourable tax treaties with the country's top trading partners, bolstering logistics infrastructure (including connectivity with ports), encouraging sector-specific skill development, targeting high-volume local production of capital goods and investing in smart manufacturing facilities.
These enablers, they say, are critical to boost India's value proposition and getting the biggest global players to invest top dollars in mega manufacturing capacities in critical sectors such as automobiles, renewable energy, telecoms equipment, electronics and batteries — more so in a changing geopolitical scenario when global companies are increasingly looking to cut their dependence on China and eying India as an alternate manufacturing hub.
The recent budget has increased the import duty on printed circuit board assembly by 5 percentage points, which is expected to spur the local production of this key input for telecom network equipment. It also exempted machines used in manufacturing solar modules and cells from the earlier 7.5%
