The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is planning to introduce stringent norms to ensure that foreign telecom vendors meet local value-addition targets to qualify for government contracts under India's preferential market access (PMA) policy.

As per DoT, the global vendors will have to declare VA (value-addition) levels under a self-certification system that will have built-in penalties in case of false declarations and incentives for compliance.

Declared VA levels will be monitored jointly by the DoT's technical wing, the Telecom Engineering Centre, and the Standardisation Testing & Quality Certification directorate, which is part of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology.

The proposed self-certification system is going to be a key element of PMA policy which calls for minimum 30 per cent local sourcing of security sensitive technology products for government contracts across central ministries, excluding defence.

Currently, the consultations are underway to finalise local VA targets for about 23 security-sensitive technology products.

The VA targets and timeframes will be fixed after a thorough assessment of considerations from the global network vendors as well. The previous government had recommended that global vendors meet 45 per cent and 65 per cent of their local value-addition targets by 2017 and 2020 respectively, a suggestion that was met with protests from leading trade bodies across the US, Europe and Japan.