New Delhi, Oct 12: Union IT secretary K K Jaswal is at present on a 11-day tour to the US where he would hard sell India as a preferred hardware destination. Jaswal, who left on October 10, is leading a high-level delegation comprising representatives of Moser Baer, Wipro and Hcl Infosystems, among others, and is expected to meet top officials of hardware giants like Intel, IBM, AMD, Dell, Sun, Apple and others, official sources said.

Besides positioning India as a desirable location for hardware manufacturing, the delegation is will try to attract investment from the major global players. Indian is targetting an investment of 10 billion dollar in hardware by 2008 and so far the country has lost to China and other South Asian countries in investment from major players in terms of manufacturing.

To give a fillip to the languishing hardware sector, the IT Department had last month submitted a set of proposals to finance ministry aimed at tariff rationalisation. As per the it agreement, India has to move towards a zero duty regime for 207 items by 2005, sources said, adding "now we want see how it is going to impact Indian hardware industry, so there are some adjustments which are to be made in the tariff structure to enable the Indian hardware industry to face the challenge after 2005".
The idea behind the proposed visit is to demonstrate that despite all constraints it was possible to manufacture products in India, they said. Bureau Report