Government will soon start an Electronics Development Fund with a corpus of Rs10,000 crore to provide financial assistance to domestic companies in the field of electronics manufacturing and encourage innovation in the sector.
“We will soon start Electronics Development Fund (EDF) which I hope will very soon have a corpus of Rs10,000 crore. It will be used to encourage innovation and support entrepreneurship,” Department of Electronics and IT (DeitY) Secretary J S Deepak said while speaking at the launch of Qualcomm’s Design in India initiative.
He said the fund, housed with Canbank Venture Capital Fund, will start this month with an initial corpus of Rs2,500 crore and rest will be raised from various sources.
“This fund is a fund of funds. This will fund venture capitalist who in turn will fund domestic companies in the field of electronics system design and manufacturing.
“We need to change present system of electronics manufacturing. It has to be rich in domestic Intellectual Property Rights,” Deepak said.
At the event, Qualcomm announced $4 lakh corpus for development of electronic products by Indian entrepreneurs under its ‘Design in India’ programme in association with IT industry body Nasscom. “The company creating a product under the Design in India programme will own IPR for it. We only want to boost ecosystem for electronics design and commercialisation of innovative products,” Qualcomm India President Sunil lalvani said.