Davos 2024: India's semiconductor policy is absolutely right, says Ashwini Vaishnaw

Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw (L) and Moneycontrol's Chandra R Srikanth (R) at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 18.

As the semiconductor race heats up across the globe, Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said that India must focus and excel at both semiconductor design and manufacturing.

Speaking to Moneycontrol on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Vaishnaw said, “It is no longer a question of semiconductor design or manufacturing. It's a question of design and manufacturing. So I think this is what the message we got from all the senior leaders who expressed their satisfaction."

The minister, who has already had around 50 discussions in Davos, also pointed out the need to strengthen India's already robust semiconductor design capability.

"India has a very strong design capability. And that design capability has today matured from being a back office, to designing entire product, designing complete product, to further maturing to conceptualising a customer's need and then converting that into a design. This strength, we must further strengthen. this strength, we must keep our focus on," he added.

After holding a series of meetings at WEF, Vaishnaw said that leaders in the semiconductor ecosystem highly appreciate India's framework.

"We had a very interesting panel yesterday where senior semiconductor leaders were present. And today we just finished a roundtable on semiconductors. The net message out of this entire series of conversations is that the policy framework that our prime minister has laid is absolutely the right framework," the IT minister said.

Vaishnaw said that leaders in the ecosystem have appreciated the execution of India's semiconductor policy. He also noted that Micron commenced construction of its plant within 90 days.

The Indian government is also providing a $10 billion chip subsidy, and so far out of that 13-14 percent of that has been approved for Micron.

When asked about further approvals, Vaishnaw said, "Our prime minister has very clearly said that the semiconductor industry is a 20-year journey. It's a, it's a long haul. We must continuously, diversely, meticulously, methodically keep working step by step. So that's why his focus has always been on developing the entire ecosystem."