Is India’s Semiconductor Dream Under Threat?

India's semiconductor dream is under threat as none of the major chipmaking companies, including Intel, TSMC, Samsung, Global Foundries, and Micron, have applied for the incentives provided.

In the 1970s, India made quite a visionary bet — on chips!

We’re talking about semiconductors, of course. We realized that almost everything in the world would rely on electronic components in the future. And it would all need these complex chips to power them. So we set up a government-owned entity called the Semiconductor Complex Ltd (SCL) in Mohali in 1983. We’d design chips. We’d manufacture them. Maybe even export them to the world.

We were chipmakers on a mission.

But in 1989, the dream was shattered. A massive fire broke out at SCL and it burnt down almost everything. We lost ₹60 crores worth of imported equipment. We were still a young nation grappling with a lot of other internal issues. So fixing this took a backseat. And it took us 8 years to put the pieces back together aga...

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