Semiconductors: ‘India on track to do in 10 years what China did in 30’
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: With incentives and assistance worth USD 10 billion (Rs. 81,993 crores) provided to encourage local chip manufacturing, India is proceeding to become a key player in the global semiconductor supply chain in the next decade, Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Thursday.
“We are on track to do in the next 10 years what countries like China took 25-30 years but they could not succeed,” the media quoted him as saying.
The Centre unveiled this massive production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme in 2020 which attracted global companies like India’s Vedanta and Taiwan’s Foxconn, promising multi-billion-dollar investment in setting up units to manufacture chips, which are used in manufacturing products ranging from mobile phones to cars.
“Sometimes there are people with either lack of understanding or … they deliberately characterize the last 15 months of effort in different ways. But the India story on semiconductors… the vision of India being a semiconductor nation started a few months ago for the first time after 70 years,” he said.
The government is implementing a “comprehensive curriculum” in partnership with the industry for creating 85,000 globally skilled talent for VLSI (very large scale integration), with students from post-doctorate degrees, masters, and undergraduate courses, he said.
“We have rebuilt the electronics ecosystem since 2014, exporting over one lakh crores and crossed almost eight lakh rows of total electronic production… and becoming an increasingly big presence in global value … supply chains for electronics,” Chandrasekhar said.
He also announced that the government is “charging forward” in the design part of the semiconductor ecosystem with 30 startups, among which five have received direct financial support from the government.
Slamming the opposition, the MoS regretted that India missed the bus “repeatedly” on electronics and semiconductors.
“When Fairchild, the precursor to Intel, came to India in 1957 and wanted to set up a packaging unit, we chased them away. And that packaging unit went on to become … one of Asia’s largest packaging hubs in the world,” he said.
“In 1987, we were just two years behind the latest node in chips. And today we are 12 generations behind,” Chandrasekhar added.
He said that the government aims to cap USD 300 billion in the electronics industry by 2025-26, and USD 110 billion for semiconductors by 2029.
Chandrasekhar also cited the Advanced Therapy Medicinal Product (ATMP) project with Micron, the global leader in memory solutions, which will create 5,000 jobs and 15,000 indirect roles in the semiconductor industry.
