The electronics industry has developed mainly after independence. It covers a wide range of products including transistor sets, televisions, telephone exchanges, telecommunication, computers and various equipments for posts and telegraph, defence, railway and meteorological departments. The electronics industry has revolutionised the lifestyle of the people throughout the world.
The electronics industry in India started with radio manufacturing in the 1850s. The setting up of the Indian Telephone Industry (ITI) in 1950 at Bangalore gave a boost to this industry. It now meets the needs of post and telegraph, defence, railways, electricity boards, etc. ITI now has the main manufacturing units located at Bangalore, Naini, Rai Bareli, Mankapur, Palakkad and Srinagar.
Bharat Electronics Ltd. (BEL) was set up at Bangalore in 1956, to fulfill the needs of the defence services, All India Radio and the meteorological department. Its main centres of production are located at Bangalore, Ghaziabad, Pune, Panchkula, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kotdwara, Machilipatnam and Taloja. BEL also exports a variety of equipments to Asian and European countries.
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The software has emerged as a major industry in the field of electronics. The computer industry made a modest beginning in the mid 1970s. Now it has achieved a major breakthrough. The main reason for its rapid growth is a big bank of technically competent manpower. One of the major achievements has been the development of the super computer Param which can make almost 100,00 crore calculations per second.
The Department of Electronics has established electronic parks in different parts of the country. The main centres are at Srinagar, Mohali, Noida, Jaipur, Gandhinagar, Guwahati, Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, Vishakhapatnam, Indore, Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Mysore, Coimbatore and Thiruvananthapuram. These software technology parks provide single window service and high data communication facility to the software experts.
There are more than 100 units in the private sector producing electronic and telecommunication equipments. Most of these units are located in Delhi, Kanpur, Lucknow, Jaipur, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Coimbatore, Hyderabad and Kolkata.
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Today, India is in a position to offer cost effective, great quality, high reliability and speedy deliveries. It also provides the application of the state-of-art technologies in the software industry.
India has captured software markets of some of the Map 17.12 India-Main centres of electronic industries advanced countries of the world like USA, UK, Japan and many European countries. The Indian electronics industry is also helping the development and growth of space technology.
India produced electronic goods worth more than 70,000 crores in 2001-02. Bangalore is the largest centre of electronics goods production, and is rightly called the ‘Electronic Capital of India.’ It is expected that the software exports would account for about half of the total foreign exchange earnings of India.