"CHIPS NOT RISKY BUSINESS ANYMORE"

Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar opens up on how India is pushing ahead with its semiconductor policy

- NIDHI SINGAL

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.