India’s Mission on Semiconductor

India’s mission to build a semiconductor and be a global hub for electronic design and manufacturing could have been executed a long time ago. Sadly, it missed a couple of opportunities in the past due to the corruptive mindset of the people back then, and the challenges faced in regard to logistics. 

Although it has taken the mission seriously now to execute at this point in time. But if we looked at one of the missed opportunities back in 60’s Fairchild Semiconductor which is a leader in the space of semiconductors and transistors, wanted to set up a fabrication unit that was silicon-based in India. However, due to the lethargic mindset of the bureaucrats, they decided to establish it in Malaysia. 

Like that it continues to miss opportunities from Intel, lack of support from Government to BEL, SCL, and the difficulties during the time when Intel and the competitor’s wanted to set up in India, that move away the people to setup in China, and the withdrawal of the bid lately until 2013, couldn’t let India to be a part in revolutionizing the semiconductor industry. 

Keeping the lost opportunities aside, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2019 launched a Semiconductor Mission. It’s an incentive plan of $10 billion that promises to offer a fiscal support upto 50% of the cost of the project to fabricators and display. This grabbed the attention of  Vedanta-FoxConn and International Semiconductor Consortium. Apart from these 20 interest requests and 3 major investment interest was shown to the Government since the year 2019.

The Union Minister of IT wants to launch a chip that is made in India that which would be live on 2024. It is believed that when this comes into the market, the prices of the computers, phones and medical equipments would drastically fall. They want to setup the manufacturing unit in Gujurat, following which it’ll come in other states. The Central Government is in constent talk with big leaders in the semiconductor industry such as Micron, Foxconn to to set up a manufacturing plant in the country.

In the Semicon India 2023 Conference Narendra Modi encourages the investors and industrialists to step into the semiconductor business. And that the tech companies will be given 50% assistance financially if they setup manufacturing facilities for semiconductor in India. And that India is creating an ecosystem so that the semiconductor industry grows in the country. 

What’s needed to get it right?

They considered in the conference that for a first company to set up, both the central and state government has to come up with a clear policy with an eco-system that is efficient enough. 

In the 12 months they aim to aceept 2 high quality proposals for semiconductor chip fabrication and they anticipate in next 5 years the electronic industry of manufacturing would have grown $300 billion and the same growth will be seen in the semi conductor industry is what the Minister Ashwani Vaishnaw said. 

He as well claimed on the fact that any company who wants to open a shop in india would have to make as normal decision as they could, without keeping the considerations of geopolitical and supply chain in their mind as the governments says that they have set up an ecosystem that will support them in regards to those considerations. 

Though there are numerous instances where India at this time could have lived it’s mission, given they had firm policy decisions back then, we could have luterally been the global hub of the semiconductor manufacturing and design on this day. The missed opportnities are not just once or twice, it was several times that it couldn’t make.

Surpassing all that, if it still keeps the aim high to make it to the mission, we hope it has a solid plan this time in overcoming all the issues which was faced earlier, to achieve it definitely. But it is possible because of the interest of the foreign chipmakers in setting up a business in India even after decades. It is upon the Government to hold upon this time to catch up with the latest technology of fabrication for around 15 to 20 years, although it is known that we can’t be the major player of the industry in many other aspects of the technology.