New Delhi: Giving a big boost to “Make In India”, the department of industrial promotion and policy (DIPP) has cleared 19 proposals in defence sectors for grant of industrial license. These included applications from Reliance Aerospace, Bharat Forge, Mahindra Telephonic Integrated Systems, Punj Lloyd and Tata Advanced Materials. Many of these proposals were pending for several years.
Moreover, in case of another additional 14 pending defence applications, applicants were informed that licenses were not required anymore as a vast number of defence items have been delicensed.
“It is expected that clearance of these 33 applications and the deregulation of defence product list excluding a large number of components from purview of industrial licensing will provide a major impetus to advanced manufacturing in defence sector,” said DIPP, adding that it has been possible to approve these cases as consequence of the simplification of FDI policy.
As per the liberalised policy, the FDI cap in defence has raised from 26 per cent to 49 per cent. It also permitted portfolio investments of up to 24 per cent of the total equity of the investee/JV company under automatic route and doing away with requirement of 51 per cent equity ownership by a single investor.
DIPP’s licensing committee also discussed the possibility of removal of stipulation of annual capacity in the industrial license as also to permit of sale of licensed items to other entities. The DIPP would notify about the decision by issue of a Press Note.
Government has taken a series of measures to improve the ease of doing business in India. “The emphasis has been on simplification and rationalisation of the existing rules and introduction of information technology to make governance more efficient, effective, simple and user friendly,” it said.
It said that the measures include 24X7 availability of on-line filing of industrial license (IL) and industrial entrepreneur memorandum applications, increasing initial validity period of industrial license to three years and streamlining the processing of applications for grant of extension of validity of industrial license.
Also the government is now treating partial commencement of production as commencement of production for all the items included in the license, and has done away with the requirement of affidavit from the applicants of defence industrial license.
