Facility to manufacture mobile devices, base-station controllers Nokia announced Tuesday that it will be manufacturing base-station controllers in India. The base-station controllers will be made at a manufacturing facility in Chennai where the company is planning to make mobile devices.The production of both the mobile devices and the base-station controllers will start during the first half of next year, the company said.Nokia announced in April this year that it would be making mobile devices in Chennai. The company also has three research and development (R&D) facilities in India. An anticipated boom in mobile telephony use in India is attracting multinational and local companies to set up manufacturing operations in the country. India’s mobile telephone subscriber base touched 100 million in April, and the government is now targeting 250 million mobile telephone subscribers by 2007.Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson in Stockholm, Sweden, for example, is making radio base stations in India. Elcoteq Network Corp, an Espoo, Finland based electronics manufacturing services (EMS) company, has also set up a manufacturing facility in Bangalore in Karnataka state, where the company plans to make terminal equipment such as mobile phones, and communications network equipment like mobile base stations and routers for broadband equipment.New manufacturing facilities are likely to come up in India as Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) in Delhi, India’s large state-owned telecom services provider is planning to introduce a change in its purchase policy, that will require its suppliers to manufacture equipment locally. “BSNL is going to make changes in its purchase policy, and they are going to insist that whenever they buy equipment, it will have to be manufactured in India, because they can get good service backup,” Dayanidhi Maran, India’s minister for communications and information technology said in April. Technology Industry