India’s Semiconductor Push Now Needs Engineers as Much as Factories

India’s semiconductor programme is increasingly turning its attention from factories to the people needed to design and operate them. MeitY Secretary S Krishnan told YourStory that the next phase of the India Semiconductor Mission will expand beyond fabs and packaging into design, equipment, materials, R&D and talent — making workforce development a centr part of the semiconductor strategy.

The country has already trained around 70,000 semiconductor design engineers in four years, according to the government. Students across roughly 400 engineering colleges have also received access to industry-grade Electronic Design Automation tools, giving them exposure to the same software used by professional chip designers. Government programmes have supported hundreds of chip designs and expanded access to design infrastructure among startups and academic institutions.

The manufacturing base is expanding alongside that talent pipeline. Twelve projects carrying more than ₹1.64 lakh crore in proposed investment were approved under Semicon 1.0. Five facilities have now commenced commercial production, including units operated by Micron, Kaynes and CG Semi, as well as newer production lines at CDIL Semiconductor and Suchi Semicon.

Semicon 2.0, approved in July with an outlay of ₹1.275 lakh crore, widens the programme considerably. Its six pillars cover design, machines and materials, additional fabs, advanced packaging, applied R&D and talent. The government has separately outlined plans to train one lakh technicians as the ecosystem expands into more manufacturing-intensive areas.

Krishnan argues that technical education will also need to adapt to AI. Students should learn to use AI across disciplines, he said, while retaining enough domain knowledge to recognise when a model is wrong and independently work toward the correct answer. That may become especially important in semiconductor engineering, where increasingly powerful design software can accelerate work, but deep technical judgement remains critical.