India’s first indigenous chip to be available by December 2024

India will get its first semiconductor chip by December this year, Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister for Communications, Electronics & Information Technology said while kicking off Network 18’s Rising Bharat Summit 2024 event on March 19.

“By December 2024, the first made-in-India chip will hit the market… Electronic manufacturing is very important for ‘Viksit Bharat,'” Vaishnaw said.

The Minister for Railways, Communications, Electronics and Information Technology also reiterated Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of India successfully establishing a semiconductors industry.

Recalling his team’s meetings with PM Modi, Vaishnaw said, “We would ask the Prime Minister if he could spare about 45 minutes for a review. However, the PM would end up spending over three hours with us discussing semiconductors.”

The foundation of Viksit Bharat was laid down in the last 10 years and it will be strengthened in the next five years, Vaishnaw said.
The minister’s remark comes days after he told CNBC’s Street Signs Asia that India wants to be among the world’s top five semiconductor producers in the next five years.

The chip industry “is a very complex market, and global value chains and global supply chains are extremely complex in the current context,” he said on March 15. “We think in the next five years, we will be among the top five semiconductor nations in the world.”

Meanwhile, at the Rising Bharat Summit 2024, Vaishnaw also reacted to the Opposition’s allegation that the PM Modi-led government has only set up chip assembly lines in India but has been falsely claiming to be manufacturing chips in the country.

He explained that semiconductor is a very complex market and whenever work to set up any industry begins in a country, it undergoes a process. “Every industry has its life cycle. If only the Congress governments had started work on it in the 1980s, imagine where India would be right now. Congress wasted India’s first four decades. They became India’s lost decades,” he said.

“The Congress’ policies throttled the manufacturing industry and made a spider web of regulations such that even if anyone wanted to, they would not be able to manufacture,” the minister said.

At present, the foundation for the manufacturing industry to flourish has been laid out, he asserted and cited examples of mobile manufacturing which he said was negligible in India until 10 years ago but is a $5 billion industry now, similarly electronics is a $105 billion industry with double-digit growth. Defence manufacturing is leading to $2 billion in exports, telecom is witnessing $1 billion worth of exports, he added. CNBCTV18