India will not impose licensing requirements or other restrictions on imports of laptops and computers but is putting in place a system to monitor the quantity of imports and where they originate from, a top government official said on Friday.
This is a big change from the government’s earlier move to allow imports of these only after obtaining licences. The decision was announced in August and was to come into force with immediate effect but after the concerns raised by the industry the implementation of the decision was deferred till November 1.
In between, the government has engaged with various stakeholders and the industry and revised its stand.
“We are only saying that somebody who is importing laptops, have to be under close watch, so that we can look at these imports. It is basically monitoring, which we are doing. It has nothing to do with restrictions as such,” Commerce Secretary Sunil Barthwal told reporters here.
The Director General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) Santosh Kumar Sarangi said there will be an import management system, which will come into place from November 1. The work is in progress and hopefully it will be in place before October 30, he said.
India already has an import monitoring system for certain products like steel, coal and paper.
The licensing conditions on imports were put on the grounds of security and to spur domestic manufacturing of these products.
While announcing the licensing rules the government had also said that it wants IT products to come from “trusted sources”.
India imports about $ 8 billion worth goods every year on which restrictions have been placed. Most of these come from China.
To push domestic manufacturing, the government had announced a Rs 17000 crore revised Production Linked Incentive scheme for IT hardware manufacturing.
Under the new scheme it has received 32 applications from laptop manufacturers which include names like Dell, HP, Foxconn, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, Flextronics and Optiemus.
In the earlier version of the Rs 7,350 crore PLI scheme, applications of 14 companies including Dell, ICT (Wistron), Rising Stars Hi-Tech (Foxconn), Lava, Dixon, and Optiemus Electronics, were approved. However, only two companies – Dell and Bhagwati – were able to meet FY22 targets.