'Indian semiconductor industry is not a risky business anymore,' says Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar

India's decades old dream of becoming a semiconductor nation is becoming a reality as the government has approved one fab and two more testing and packaging proposals. In conversation with Business Today, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology, talks about what this development means for India and the strategy ahead. Edited excerpts:

India’s dream of becoming a semiconductor nation is finally becoming a reality with the approval of the first commercial fab. What does this mean? 

What we have achieved in the last two years, two months, is certainly by any stretch of imagination tremendous. Talking about pure semiconductors, we have almost $26-27 billion of interest in terms of investment. And the companies that have lined up today are like the who’s who. In the fab space, [there’s] Tower and PSMC; in the packaging space we have Renesas, Micron, and we have a whole set of other proposals still in the pipeline. In global R&D, you have LAM Research, Applied Materials, ASML, AMD. The entire semiconductor ecosystem is present in India with the R&D centres. We have almost 12,000 engineers who have joined VLSI degree programmes for the new curriculum this year. 

Hopefully in the next few days, we will be announcing the Bharat Semiconductor Research Center, which will be co-located with the Semiconductor Laboratory. We have in the pipeline the modernisation of Semiconductor Laboratory as well for which we have seven proposals. If you look at all this, we are in an extremely good spot in terms of where we want to be in the next decade. I’m absolutely confident that if we sit down, talk in 2034, we would have significantly moved ahead of China. We were nothing two years ago, we had absolutely no footprint and [were] absolutely absent, and [now] here we are.
 
What is the status of Tower’s application? 

The Tower investment proposal, which is still being evaluated, is a significant investment because it is the first big global foundry company that is directly investing. Intel wanted to acquire Tower, so in [a] sense India has an opportunity to acquire something that Intel wanted.

What led to the Indian companies with no prior experience to join India’s semiconductor journey?

Why Indian companies are investing in fabs, in packaging is because [they are] no longer in doubt that we will be successful. Two years ago, you could have said maybe we are successful, maybe we’re not successful, why would we put money into something that is untested, are we going to be guinea pigs? Today, given the electronics manufacturing performance, and given where we are going with semiconductor, it is no longer a risky investment. One of the investors said, we want to be the first. It is like a rush now. 

With the current approvals, we are exhausting the $10 billion allocated for the scheme. Will more funds be allocated?

We are certainly going to have to deal with the issue as we are running out of resources in the current policy and the scheme. And we will go back after the Prime Minister [comes back]again and seek more money. And that is something that we hope to do very quickly. 

What kind of semiconductor ecosystem is being built? 

The supply chain is rapidly being built up. There are many companies that are essentially suppliers to Micron, PSMC, Tower and Renesas. It is inevitable that the supply chain ecosystem, the suppliers, this hugely complicated ecosystem, will come in the wake of these beginners. That is the beauty of bringing in semiconductors and making [it] successful. The jobs and investment will not just be in semiconductors, they will be in electronics; they will be in the supply chain that supports the semiconductor fabs and packaging unit; and also design and innovation ecosystem that will get capitalised. I always use the example of UPI, which created a fintech ecosystem worth $50 billion. Similarly, the electronics ecosystem has created the semiconductor one, [and it will] create the supply chain, the design, the research, and that will become $100-200 billion ecosystem in the next decade. 

Has there been any progress on the display fab side? 

There are a couple of very sound proposals. We are certainly going to deal with it.  
          
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