Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal has
visited the manufacturing facility of US-based electric vehicle major Tesla at
Fremont, California and said the company would be doubling its auto components
imports from Bharat.
The minister is in US on a four-day visit. The world’s
largest electric car producer Tesla Inc’s chief Elon Musk met Prime Minister
Narendra Modi in June in New York and after the meeting Musk had said he
planned to visit Bharat in 2024.
“Visited Tesla’s state of the art manufacturing
facility at Fremont, California. Extremely delighted to see talented Indian
engineers and finance professionals working at senior positions and
contributing to Tesla’s remarkable journey to transform mobility.
“Also, proud to see the growing importance of auto
component suppliers from Bharat in the Tesla EV supply chain. It is on its way
to double its components imports from Bharat. Missed Elon Musk’s magnetic
presence and I wish him a speedy recovery,” said Goyal on social networking
platform X.
The visit assumes significance as there are reports
that Bharat is looking at giving customs duty concessions to Tesla for setting
up a plant in the country.
In September, Goyal said the company is looking to
source components worth around US$ 1.9 billion from Bharat this year against US$
1 billion in 2022.
Going forward, demand for electric vehicles will
increase and it will help in pushing the growth of the sector.
Earlier, the government had stated that it is not
looking to frame a separate policy for providing incentives to Tesla, and the
company can apply to avail support measures under existing schemes like PLI for
auto and advanced chemistry cells.
The government has rolled out the production-linked
incentives (PLI) schemes (PLI) for advanced chemistry cell (ACC) battery
storage with an outlay of ₹ 18,100 crore and ₹ 26,058 crore PLI scheme for
auto, auto-components and drone industries.
When asked whether the government is considering duty
concessions on completely built-up units to attract certain sections of
electric cars into Bharat, Goyal in September had said “everything we have done
has been done equally without any differentiation, without any preferences.
This is the government which provides equal opportunity to everybody. So, we
will come out with a policy.”
In August 2021, Elon Musk had said Tesla might set up
a manufacturing unit in Bharat if it first succeeded with imported vehicles in
the country. He had said Tesla wanted to launch its vehicles in India “but
import duties are the highest in the world by far of any large country!”.
Currently, Bharat imposes 100 per cent import duty on
fully imported cars with CIF (Cost, Insurance and Freight) value more than US$
40,000 and 70 per cent on those costing less than the amount.
PTI
