To give a push to the "Make in India" initiative by the Indian government; One of the largest chipset makers - MediaTek is working on a new program. It has collaborated with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), India, Indian Cellular Association (ICA) and the Ministry of Economic Affairs(MOEA), Taiwan to launch a smartphone design training program.
The program will go functional later this year, and will last for 75-days. The main agenda of the training is to promote engineering talent in India and to enhance their contribution to the smartphone industry. India is now among the primary markets for smartphones all over the world, and this program will train managers and senior engineers in the arena of effective planning and production of smartphone designing schemes.
Elucidating on the program, Aruna Sundararajan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) said,"We have observed that hardware design in the handset industry, especially integration of key components, is lacking in India, so the idea of this program is to pick professionals working in the hardware domain and further train them in handset specific design to narrow the current gap in the local industry. We appreciate MediaTek’s support in achieving this target. This program is also expected to substantially accelerate the government’s ‘Make in India’ and ‘Digital India’ initiatives."
Under the program, MediaTek will select around 50 professionals from all over India. Top handset makers will execute the selection, and the eligibility criteria would include at least five years of expertise in Research and Development (R&D) in electronics. MediaTek believes that this program would provide a much-needed push to the ‘Make in India’ initiative. It is noteworthy to highlight that earlier this year Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad announced that India produces 100 million mobile phone units every year.
Ming-Kai Tsai, CEO of MediaTek said,"We appreciate the effort the Indian Government is making towards building a global manufacturing base for the electronics sector in the country. MediaTek, as a key partner to the country’s growth story, is taking its commitment a step further to support domestic innovation and production. We are happy to offer our expertise in the design domain to help set the framework of this skill development program.”
Interestingly, In 2004 MediaTek opened an office in Noida followed by an investment of $350 million in the year 2014 for business expansion and setup of an R&D facility in Bengaluru. Other than MediaTek, companies like OnePlus, Sony, HTC, and others are also planning to invest in India for promoting the Make in India initiative.
Currently, China is the world leader for smartphone manufacturing. In order to curb the dependence on the Chinese imports, India needs proper "manufacturing" initiatives because most of the factories (even the Indian brands like Micromax) that have been opened in India, are doing the assembling work. It means that the product parts are imported from China and only the assembling work is being done in India. The major chunk of production money is still transferred to China market as it provides all the parts used in smartphones.
