A topic which certainly worries me about India and also our defense industry.
We don't even produce passive components like resistors, capacitors and inductors for use in commercial and defense applications. Japanese and Koreans dominate this sector. Chinese haven't been successful at beating them. In PCB's Chinese dominate it. I am not sure where we are in this area. There are certain PCB makers in India, whether they are fully self reliant is something I could not ascertain. And I don't have to tell about chips. We don't even manufacture small Micro chips.
Our electronics and semiconductor sector alone requires 1 lakh crore infusion every year until 2040 if we have to become self reliant. We have the talent who are unfortunately working for big American companies who in turn sell the tech developed by Indians to us at marked up price. AMD, Qualcomm, Intel, Texas Instruments, Analog devices derive lot of R & D from India. AMD and Qualcomm has more open positions to fill in India next only to USA. We need a dedicated city like Shenzhen for hardware. PLI schemes are not going to cut it. It is unfortunate we are not thinking of building an entire city just for this sectors alone given the importance it has to national security. We need to get at least a mature node 14nm fab going to make FPGA's, Microcontrollers and specialized chips in Embedded applications. With our volatile democracy I highly doubt it will happen anytime soon.
Good that you have put the spotlight on the deficiency.
Even now as far as electronic components go, we import quite a lot.
God forbid if tomorrow the US and the Western block decides to embargo India we would be in hot waters. The only readily available option is Russia. But Russia is probably a half or one full generation behind the West in high tech electronics.
Huawei was brought to its knees by the US led embargo on components supply.
China is unfortunately ahead of India in electronics at present but were very susceptible to pressure. It needed talks between the heads of state to persuade the US to relax the embargo.
It is not an easy task to achieve full self sufficiency in the entire range of electronic components. But I hope that the Government at least has an action plan to guide us.
One sad fact is that many indigenous weapons rely to an significant extent on imported components. But its OK. Because we don't have an alternative at present and most other countries are in a similar position. But it is an weakness which should be remedied if we want to escape any future blackmail. Also there are theories that some countries incorporate kill switches in these components. Probably not true.
The bitter truth is that the West seems to have almost an monopoly on many areas of high technology. Without Western MNC's cooperation establishing an Semiconductor FAB in India will be an uphill task.
Unless true high quality indigenous R & D really takes off in India and our Universities and Colleges become international level centres of excellence. Even then it may take a couple of decades to match the output of the West.
Nothing is impossible and probably we may surprise the world sooner than later.
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