MUMBAI, 7 JUNE 2026 —
India imports over ₹5 lakh crore worth of semiconductors every year. The chip in your phone, your car, your electricity meter — made abroad, priced abroad, supplied on someone else's terms. When COVID broke global supply chains in 2020 and automobile factories froze because chips were unavailable, India suddenly understood what complete import dependence actually feels like. The response was the India Semiconductor Mission, launched in December 2021.
For 40 years policy after policy came and went — not a single commercial chip fabrication facility was ever built
₹76,000 crore in subsidies. A 50% capital subsidy for any company willing to set up a facility. And a promise: India would become a global semiconductor hub. That promise has a history. Tower Semiconductor had been proposing a chip fabrication facility in India since 2013. A decade passed. No ground was broken.
Look carefully at what this joint venture actually was. Vedanta is a mining company — zinc, aluminium, oil. It had no track record in semiconductor manufacturing. Foxconn, brought in as the technology provider, is an assembly company, not a chip designer. Seventeen months later, Foxconn pulled out.
What was not said: the Micron facility is an ATMP plant — Assembly, Testing, Marking, and Packaging. It does not fabricate chips. It packages chips that are fabricated elsewhere. Micron's actual chips are made by TSMC in Taiwan. India got the gift wrapping.
The taxpayer funded 70% of the wrapping paper.
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