Minister of state for electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar will hold a series of one-on-one meetings with leading consumer electronics and IT hardware makers including Apple, Samsung, Dell, HP, Foxconn, Cisco, Lava, Micromax and Dixon starting this week to discuss their expansion plans.

About 16 selected firms are expected to have these individual meetings that will focus on their investments in the country and the hurdles they face, people aware of the development said.

“The government has asked the companies to make a half-an-hour presentation to the minister and his team on the status of their investments in India and future plans,” “This will be followed by a discussion on the future projects and how to get more manufacturing of important components started in India.”

The meetings, scheduled from this week onwards, come on the back of a few interactions Chandrasekhar had with industry bodies.

A senior handset industry executive said the genesis of these exclusive meetings was when members suggested that each company should be able to talk about their prospects and concerns regarding ease of doing business in India.

These companies are entwined with the production-linked incentive (PLI) schemes for handsets and IT hardware, which are key to the government’s blueprint to boost local manufacturing by getting global players to establish factories here.

In the meetings, IT hardware firms are expected to urge the minister to make the PLI scheme more attractive. The industry has sought increasing the incentive rate under the scheme to 5% from the current average of 2.3% annually and expanding the span of the scheme to eight years from four now.

Over the last one week, the newly appointed minister has held scores of meetings with different industry bodies as well as chiefs of top technology companies, including Ajit Mohan, vice president and managing director of Facebook India, and Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairperson of Bharti Airtel.

Chandrasekhar, a technocrat, also met industry bodies such as information and communications technology (ICT) sector’s MAIT, Electronic Industries Association of India (Elcina), India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA), and Indian Printed Circuits Association (IPCA).

Representatives of ecommerce giant Amazon had met Chandrasekhar last week where they presented Amazon’s Fire TV Stick manufactured in India to the minister. “Hope to see Amazon manufacture and source more electronics from India,” he had tweeted after the meeting.

Microblogging site Twitter’s global and India public policy teams including its policy chief Vijaya Gadde had also met the minister last week. So did Banmali Agarwala, president, infrastructure, defence and aerospace and global corporate affairs, at Tata Sons.

Associations such as US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) and US-India Business Council (USIBC) have also held interactions with the minister lately.