India is not short of engineers, but of engineers who are ready to build chips, panelists said on Tuesday, arguing that the talent gap facing the semiconductor mission is one of practical competence, exposure and experience across the whole value chain, rather than of numbers.
She also announced a School of Semiconductor: a small-scale production fab planned at Central Polytechnic College, Tharamani, with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and industry partners, for prototyping and training on an actual production line, on land already allocated and expected to be running by next year. Asked how success should be measured, Ms. Sujhatha chose intellectual property (IP) creation over training numbers and certificates. Mr. Mr. Baig, for his part, pointed to a simpler metric: the number of openings for freshers, which remained low compared with other fields.
Governments were funding India’s own designs and products, she said, through the Centre’s DLI and Tamil Nadu’s design promotion scheme. Makhija said the outcome had to be products and more start-ups, and Mr. Ranjith said skilling worked only when knowledge was transformed into capability, capability into employment, and employment into innovation.
Beyond design
India was home to 20% of the world’s semiconductor design talent, she said, but manufacturing was still nascent, leaving a shortfall across outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT), wafer fabrication, materials and machines, which is a gap the India Semiconductor Mission, in its first phase and now its second, has been expanding beyond fabrication and OSAT to address across the ecosystem. Makhija recalled that at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, where he did his master’s in 2006, laboratories were sponsored by companies and students worked on industry projects, and said industry and universities should together design and continuously evolve the syllabus. Ranjith said the All India Council for Technical Education had restructured the curriculum in 2023 based on industry needs and industry sat on the Boards of Studies of universities such as SRM and Anna University, but the real challenge was dedicated resources and sustained investment, including in centres of excellence.
Sujhatha, Senior Manager, Guidance, Government of Tamil Nadu, agreed that India was not short of people. Schemes such as Design Linked Incentive (DLI), which made electronic design automation tools easier to access, and Chips to Startup, under which students could learn the basics and design chips, could change that, he added. On the mismatch between what companies need and what education produces, the panel pointed to curriculum and exposure. Mr. Mr. Ms. Sujhatha pointed beyond the chip itself to equipment. The moderator, Nagaraj N, Vice President, Content Analytics and Data, The Hindu , noted that supply chain and logistics roles had proved similarly critical when the industry halted during COVID.
Vikas Makhija, Senior R&D Director, Synopsys Inc., said that the deeper gap was of mindset. Indian semiconductor start-ups had innovated mainly in services, he said, while the United States and China had the real designs. Shaik Ayman Hameed Baig, a third-year B.Tech. student in Electronics and Communication Engineering at SRM Institute of Science and Technology and the panel’s student voice, said students tended to become “the first customers for the chip, building projects on it, rather than the true designers”, with many projects in robotics and embedded systems but few in designing chips. With AI automation entering Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design, students were also confused about what to learn — manufacturing, fabrication or design — he said. “It is not actually a shortage of talent; it is more a shortage of exposure,” he said. Several companies in Tamil Nadu were making semiconductor equipment, she said, and in the current geopolitical scenario, with countries banning imports of certain equipment, even the small components that went into that equipment would become critical in a blockade.
Speaking at the ‘Who Will Build India’s Chips? “The actual shortfall is not the number of graduates that we have. Bridging the Semiconductor Talent Gap’ panel at SRM Presents The Hindu Semiconductor Summit 2026 here, Ranjith Kumar T.C., Director, PRSsemicon Technologies, said the country had 10,000 to 15,000 engineering colleges and 15 lakh to 20 lakh engineers passing out every year.
The actual shortfall would be the skilled or the industry ready engineers that we are looking at,” he said, describing the shift needed as one “from knowing to doing,” that is, from learning a concept to bringing out a chip, inculcated during college itself.
