India wants to be a bigger player in the global hardware manufacturing industry, and it sees a route to boosting local economies while doing so. Now, it\u2019s putting some money where its mouth is. The country has announced a $2 billion program designed to promote and incentivize businesses locally building hardware like laptops, PCs, servers and related edge computing kit.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, India\u2019s IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced that the Union Cabinet approved the new scheme with a budgetary outlay of over $2.06 billion (17,000 crores Indian rupees). The initiative, which is called the Production-Linked Incentive Scheme, is focused on spurring local production, by offering cash awards based on a sliding scale linked to sales of the hardware being produced.<\/p>\n

The program will run for six years and is expected to attract investments of $295 million and incremental production of $40.7 billion. It will also generate roughly 200,000 jobs \u2014 75,000 direct and the rest indirectly \u2014 the minister said at a press conference.<\/p>\n

India\u2019s moves come at a time when the country \u2014 the second biggest country in the world, and one of the most lucrative for consumer electronics \u2014 is still a net importer of hardware, largely from China. More recently, it has been chipping away at an opportunity to leverage some of its own size and technical expertise to compete with China on the electronics manufacturing front.<\/p>\n

The scheme announced today has not been without its headaches, though.<\/p>\n

For starters, it has been in the works for years already, but the original incarnation had been delayed due to low interest, reportedly because manufacturers \u2014 who were already producing hardware in China \u2014 didn\u2019t see enough of a financial incentive to invest in moving to India.<\/p>\n