Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be inaugurating ‘Semicon India 2023‘, to showcase India’s semiconductor capabilities and chip design innovation, on 28 July at Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Companies including Foxconn, Micron, AMD, and Vedanta will offer deep insights into technologies and innovations in chipmaking.
Various dignitaries, including Minister of State for Electronics and IT, Skill Development, and Entrepreneurship Rajeev Chandrasekhar, will be present at the event. Chandrasekhar has been an active voice of the Indian semiconductor industry. At the recent second Semicon India Future Design roadshow held in Bengaluru IISc campus, he announced that India plans to produce a minimum of 85,000 global semiconductor talent in the next two years.
While the Indian government is eyeing the evolving technology, things have not worked out in the country’s favour in the recent past. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Taiwanese conglomerate Foxconn will pull out of a joint venture with Indian giant Vedanta Ltd that was set up to produce semiconductors in Gujarat.
As per the partnership agreement Vedanta would have held 60% equity while Foxconn would have had 40%. Even though India has partnered with IMEC for technological support, the technology will still require several years of development. The situation presented an uncertain future for the Vedanta-Foxconn venture and now the project has fallen through completely.
While there have been downturns, the Indian government has been optimistic about the investments expected to rise and are already leveraging the talent available here. India is a global leader in engineering design and R&D. It has a favourable demographic advantage with a young workforce and a significant number of technologically-aligned individuals. However, expanding its potential to manufacturing requires more. Unlike the IT sector, the lack of awareness and availability of job options have been some major hurdles facing the industry.
