The Indian government is working on developing an Indian mobile phone brand, a minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, whose portfolio includes communications, said this week.

He suggested that the government would also work on creating the entire handset ecosystem in the country, arguing that the success to date of large-scale mobile manufacturing would benefit the project, encouraging ecosystem partners to come to India in the next five years.

This follows a similar initiative relating to semiconductors which has seen a Micron plant under construction and, the minister suggested, more approvals on the way. Quoted by India’s Economic Times, he apparently said: “In that sense, we are moving from the design ecosystem to fab and ATMP (assembly, test and packaging) ecosystem.”

An indigenously developed app store – Indus Appstore – has also been developed, with apps accessible in 12 Indian languages.

Of course, India does already have a home-grown mobile handset company. It’s called Lava and is a manufacturer of smartphones, feature phones, tablet computing devices and laptops or notebooks, with operations in Thailand, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mexico, the Middle East and Russia as well as India. It says it is now the only mobile handset company that makes truly ‘Make In India’ phones with complete control on design and manufacturing within India. 

Preparations are also being made to launch indigenous operating system BharOS-based smartphones on the Lava smartphone.  In the next six months there will be about 500 Lava-designed and manufactured phones in India, which will work on BharOS.