India missed bus for semiconductors ecosystem on lack of vision of past governments: MoS Chandrasekhar

New Delhi [India], July 27 : India had in the past missed the bus on electronics and semiconductors and it is the current government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi which is rebuilding India’s electronics ecosystem and pushing the country to become one of the world’s fastest-growing electronics manufacturers, said Union Minister of State Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar.
The minister today interacted with the media ahead of the second edition of ‘SemiconIndia Conference’ which is scheduled to begin tomorrow at Gandhinagar in Gujarat.  
The second edition of the conference will be inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi tomorrow and it will witness the participation of prominent names in the semiconductor industry, such as Micron Technology, Applied Materials, and Lam Research.
During the media interaction, he highlighted the significant semiconductor opportunity that India currently possesses and how the government is determined to utilise it.
“It has been 19 months since we set the ball rolling in the semiconductor ecosystem. There was a lack of political vision, strategies and there were incompetencies and missed opportunities for decades. This has held India back from semiconductors. Today, we can achieve in the coming techade what some neighbouring nations took 30 years and USD 200 billion and still failed to achieve,” MoS Chandrasekhar said.
With the increasing demand for electronics, digital products and services, the Minister spoke about the core role of semiconductors in today’s tech-driven world.
“The demand for electronics, digital products and services is only intensifying. Electronics is at the core of our lives today and Semiconductors in turn at the core of Electronics…We were almost nothing in 2014 in the semiconductor ecosystem and today we are increasingly becoming a big presence in the global value chain for electronics,” the Minister added.
Tracing the missed opportunities since the 1960s, Chandrasekhar pointed out that the previous governments failed to envision the importance of a semiconductor ecosystem in India.
“There was a lack of strategic and political vision and a big dose of incompetence. Fairchild semiconductors, which is the precursor to Intel, came to India in 1957 for a packaging unit and we chased them away. That packaging unit went on to become Asia’s largest packaging hub in Malaysia. We set up a fab for silicon and germanium transistors that had shut down. India’s major VLSI facility, Semi-Conductor Laboratory (SCL), perished, as a mysterious fire in 1989 halted production until 1997. In 1987, India was just two years behind the latest chip manufacturing technology,” he said.
“Today, we are 12 generations behind – this is how far behind as a nation on semiconductors,” the Minister stated.