ISM 2.0 will shift from building fabs to building the ecosystem: MeitY Secretary Krishnan

India has proved it can do advanced chip manufacturing and must now build everything around it, S Krishnan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), said at SEMICON India 2026 in New Delhi on Thursday.

"We have demonstrated that it is possible to carry out advanced manufacturing of this nature in the country," Krishnan said in his keynote. "The direction in which we are moving, and the key of this year's SEMICON conference, is to focus on the ecosystem."

Five of the 12 projects approved under the first phase of the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM 1.0) are now in commercial production. Counting Tata Electronics' pilot test-and-assembly unit, which is already exporting, Krishnan said chips of various kinds are now being made at six locations in India.

Why the second phase came early

ISM 1.0 was designed to stay open for about six years. Applications came in fast enough that the government committed its entire corpus within three years, forcing an early move to ISM 2.0. "We have had to move necessarily to the next phase of the programme," Krishnan said.

ISM 2.0 is built on six pillars: design, materials, chemicals and gases, equipment, fabs, and advanced packaging. Detailed guidelines for three of these have already been released, covering machines and materials, additional fabs, and ATMP and OSAT facilities.

Krishnan also pointed to faster clearances. Tata Electronics' application, he said, went from filing to approval in under 100 days. "That is the speed at which we can work when we have applications which are well prepared."

Three gaps the next phase has to close

Advanced packaging. "In some ways we are reaching the limits of Moore's law, and further compute power is going to be possibly built on the basis of better packaging of chips," Krishnan told the audience, calling packaging an area the ministry is "conscious of."

R&D tied to industry. Krishnan cited IMEC in Belgium, Singapore, Taiwan and IBM's university partnerships in the US as models where industry, academia and researchers advance the science together. "R&D gets a special mention, and we are looking to establish this R&D in association with industry so that it serves what exactly industry does."

Manufacturing talent. India has roughly 20% of the world's semiconductor design workforce. "What we don't have is a workforce which is trained in advanced manufacturing," Krishnan said. The ministry plans to work with industry to define the skills needed and set up training facilities accordingly.

"A major market, not just a manufacturing destination"

Speaking to media on the sidelines, Krishnan framed the push in terms of scale and strategy rather than subsidy. India is at an inflection point in per capita income and consumption, he said, and demand for chip-bearing products is bound to rise. "For a country this size, it cannot afford to be dependent entirely for manufacturing something as vital as semiconductors."

He added that the case was made directly to the Prime Minister at Wednesday's CEO roundtable. Geopolitics, he said, has made diversification of value chains "as much an objective of anybody in the world as making sure that you get products at competitive prices."

The turnout as a signal

Krishnan read the event's numbers as a vote of confidence: over 600 exhibiting companies, of which more than 300 are overseas; nearly 40,000 registered delegates from 52 countries, about a third of them from abroad. On the Rs 1 lakh crore in investment commitments announced at the event, he said those figures reflect only what companies are prepared to announce now. "I'm sure there'll be much more as we go along."

The three-day SEMICON India 2026 runs from September 17 to 19 at Yashobhoomi, Dwarka, on the theme "Silicon to Systems: Building the Ecosystem." Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw is scheduled to speak on the policy landscape on Friday morning.