From Jharkhand and Bihar to India’s chip lines: why semiconductor jobs are open to everyone

The women running the chip packaging lines at CG Power's plant in Sanand, Gujarat, came from Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha and the North East, with ordinary schooling and no idea they would ever work in semiconductors. Trained in Malaysia, on their first trip out of their home towns, they now explain chip packaging "like confident engineers", says Amitesh Kumar Sinha, Additional Secretary at MeitY and CEO of the India Semiconductor Mission. That, he told Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory and The Bharat Project, ahead of Semicon India 2026, is the point: semiconductor jobs in India are opening up for every kind of student, not only the ones who topped an entrance exam.

"At first semiconductors sound very hard," Sinha said. The Sanand example is his answer to that.

The pitch comes as Semicon 2.0, the second phase of the mission notified on 31 August 2026 with an outlay of Rs 1,27,500 crore, adds dedicated talent and R&D pillars to the fab and packaging incentives of the first phase. Twelve manufacturing units have been approved so far, three of them, Micron, Kaynes and CG Semi in Sanand, already in commercial production.

Every stream has a way in

Shradha put the question the way a student in Patna, Indore or Kochi would: is this industry only for startups out of IITs? Sinha's answer is that the industry is no longer an electronics-only club, let alone an elite one. A fab needs operators as much as engineers, and R&D specialists alongside both. Chemicals, gases and materials need chemical and materials engineers. Fab construction is complicated enough to need serious civil engineering. Robotics and physical AI on the shop floor need mechanical engineers. Even chip design, once purely electronics, now pulls in thermal and materials expertise. "Every stream has a connection to semiconductors," he said.

The talent pillar of Semicon 2.0 is meant to build the training that lets a chemical or mechanical graduate move into a semiconductor role, and the industry counts a multiplier of around 5.7, meaning a plant creates several times as many jobs down the line as it does on site. Women, Sinha noted, already make up more than half of India's electronics manufacturing workforce, 70% in places and the entire floor in some factories, and he expects semiconductor plants to follow. Semicon India 2026 carries a dedicated session on women in the industry, with senior India leaders from Renesas, Applied Materials, Teradyne and Micron on stage.

How a student in any college can design a chip

For those drawn to design, the route no longer runs through a handful of institutions. The Chips to Startup programme gives colleges free access to electronic design automation tools, the software used to design chips, which small teams cannot otherwise afford. PIB put the count at more than 300 academic institutions in January 2026, and Sinha said the spread covers every state, small colleges included. Student designs that reach the fabrication stage are manufactured at the Semiconductor Laboratory in Mohali or elsewhere, packaged and sent back. "A student who has seen one full cycle leaves college as a confident design engineer and can start their own startup," he said.

Such startups get seed grants and EDA tools under the Design Linked Incentive scheme, and under Semicon 2.0 the government will match, as an investor on the same terms, any venture capital they raise after the seed stage. A student not ready to start alone, Sinha suggested, can join a startup a senior is founding, build three or four years of experience, and then go out on their own.

The engineers coming home

The top of the ladder is filling from the other direction. Because of the Design Linked Incentive, Sinha said, many Indians with 25 to 30 years of chip design experience in Silicon Valley and elsewhere now want to return and start ventures at home, and Indians abroad are joining Tata, CG Power and Micron as those companies build R&D teams in India. A chip design company employs 50 to 200 people, and "if it becomes big, it becomes Qualcomm, which employs 20,000 engineers in India". Every major multinational, he listed Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom, NVIDIA, NXP and Infineon, has one of its largest design houses here, and 20% of the world's design engineers are already Indian. With a dedicated R&D pillar under Semicon 2.0, he said, "R&D-minded youth have no need to go abroad."

The nearest door is the Workforce Development pavilion at Semicon India 2026, which runs from 17 to 19 September 2026 at Yashobhoomi in Dwarka, New Delhi, with student mentorship, training on the full fab process, a day-long session by experts from Singapore on 18 September and company-funded hackathons. "This opportunity is opening up, and nobody should miss it," Sinha said. The women in Sanand did not have a pavilion to walk into. The next cohort does.