Dot Reassesses Public Purchase Policy & Make-in-india

LC Estimation Exclusions

While tightening the norms and promoting Make-in-India, the federal government had excluded imported items sourced locally from resellers and representatives from the estimation of LC. Besides, nobilities, technical charges paid out of India and supply of repackaged and refurbished items were excluded from the estimation of LC.

Class 1 & 11 Providers

All business making products under the production-linked incentive (AND ALSO) plan for telecom equipment would be treated as class 11 providers. A course 1 distributor needs to have 50% LC while a course 11 supplier requires 20% LC.

Products with >50% LC

Currently, the list of products where the minimum LC needs to be greater than 50% consist of routers, ethernet switches, media portals, consumer premises devices, Gigabyte Passive Optical Network tools, satellite phones and terminals, optical fiber and cord and telecom batteries.

The DoT had actually determined 36 products that must have more than 50% regional value enhancement to be qualified for purchase by the Centre and its associated entities. Because 5G products were omitted from the listing, it had included an enabling provision to review the items once in a while.

Reassessing Purchase Policy

The Department of Telecoms is set to reassess its public purchase policy, highlighting the Make-in-India campaign. This evaluation aims to integrate even more items and possibly ease local sourcing demands, acknowledging challenges in attaining high regional web content in electronic and telecommunications items. Stakeholders are invited to provide comments on item incorporation, neighborhood material requirements, and computation criteria within 30 days.

According to the DoT’s notification released on Wednesday seeking stakeholders’ comments, it suggests to evaluate its PPP-MII order dated October 21, 2024, especially for aspects concerning the list of products informed under the order, product wise regional content (LC) need including the ceiling of LC for design, conditions of inputs (including layout) to be qualified as LC and criteria for calculating LC for software products.