The Department of Electronics and IT (DEITY), Ministry of Communications, is in the process of finalising investment proposals from global technology providers and investors interested in building semiconductor fabrication units (fabs) in India, said Ajay Kumar, joint secretary, DEITY.
DEITY would support investors interested in establishing semiconductor wafer fabs to manufacture chips in India to increase capacity for India’s growing domestic demand. The demand for chips and components had been increasing in India. The domestic production of semiconductors could only meet the demand of $104 billion and the demand would increase to $400 billion by 2020 creating a gap of $296 billion between demand and production.
This created a unique opportunity for companies in the Electronic System Design & Manufacturing (ESDM) sector to look at India as their next destination to cater to the domestic Indian demand, he said.
The government had recently approved the National Policy on Electronics (NPE). One of the objectives of the NPE was to achieve a turnover of about $400 billion by 2020 involving investment of about $100 billion and employment to around $28 million by 2020.
Another important objective of the policy was to significantly upscale high-end human resource creation to 2500 PhDs annually by 2020 in the sector.