19th March 2024

Sitara

India’s First Do Tank linking Tech and Geopolitical Power

Letter to Principal Secretary PMO to stop back-door Chinese imports through fake “ToTs”.

We have had to write again to PMO to draw their attention to yet another attempt to subvert the goal of self-reliance. The Government has made some heroic attempts towards this goal, listed in our letter, but there are lobbies and their enablers who work continuously to undo the good work.

This time the idea is to circumvent previous Orders safeguarding National Security and restore all the unfair privileges for Chinese equipment imports through the back door, that too at nil or concessional duty with the PLI incentive bonus thrown in! The mechanism cutely enables Bidders to have “transfer of technology” arrangements with entities from countries sharing land borders with India.

Ah, so many euphemisms! So difficult to penetrate and grasp the true motives of these enablers of the entities that have inflicted so much damage on our country!

As one of our distinguished members Shri Rinka Singh put it very pithily:

“This is the classic whack-a-mole game.  Every time you whack one, another one pops up. This is like being purely defensive – “We have to succeed 100% of the time but the attacker has to succeed just once”. Given time is on his side and there are no costs to him, it is (statistically) guaranteed he will succeed.

Secondly, these are the few instances that the team here gets to know.  What happens about all those instances where we don’t know about or miss.

I think “somehow”, we must move into a more offensive mode – that of aggressively identifying the core people who are creating these gaps and at the very least calling them out publicly …  It is only after a few are publicly impacted that these instances will at least slow down…

From a longer term perspective, we must primarily focus on re-engineering our systems so that such violations become more difficult for those who implement.  More importantly, we need systems that aggressively track policy violations, learn and systemically fix them as we go forward”.

The status quo is not acceptable to the Nation.

We in SITARA whole-heartedly agree with him and hope PMO also does.

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