"Not About Licence Raj": Union Minister On Laptop Import Restrictions

A day after India put a restriction on the import of laptops, the central government has said the country has sufficient capacity for manufacturing IT hardware devices.

The government maintained that it had already announced production-linked incentives for manufacturing IT hardware in India, which will ultimately result in further lowering of the prices of such hardware.

Yesterday, the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) had issued a notification, restricting the import of laptops, tablets, all-in-one personal computers, and ultra-small form factor computers and servers (IT devices).

Their imports would now be allowed against a valid licence.

The DGFT order, however, gave exemptions to certain categories such as imports which will come as part of baggage allowance, 20 IT devices per consignment for R&D, testing, benchmarking and evaluation, for repair and re-export, for product development purposes, re-import of goods repaired abroad, and devices coming as an essential part of capital goods.

The government, as part of its rationale behind the restriction in imports, said it introduced this policy condition in order to protect the security interests of the country and its citizens.

"It is govts objective to ensure trusted hardware n systems, reduce import dependence and increase domestic mfg of this category of products (sic)," Union Minister for Electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, wrote on Twitter.

"This is not at all abt license raj - It is about regulating imports to ensure trusted and verifiable systems AND ensuring India tech eco-system uses trusted n verified systems only that are imported and/or domestically manufactured trusted systems / products," he wrote.

DGFT has prepared a portal and companies or traders who wish to import can apply for getting a licence. It is expected that DGFT will issue a licence within three-to-four days if details are provided as needed.

Meanwhile, under the Production Linked Incentive Scheme for IT hardware, which was notified on May 29, the government said 44 companies have already been registered and interested companies can submit applications until August 30. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)