India plans to establish training centres with Taiwan’s ITRI and Singapore’s A*STAR to develop its semiconductor workforce, accelerating its Semicon 2.0 strategy amidst rapid industry growth.
India is weighing a fresh push to strengthen the human side of its semiconductor strategy by inviting Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute and Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research to help set up training centres in the country, according to Business Standard. The proposal is aimed at building a domestic workforce for chip fabrication, advanced packaging and related manufacturing roles, as India’s semiconductor projects move closer to production.
Officials quoted by the newspaper said the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology could fully fund the centres if the plan goes ahead. The idea is not necessarily to recreate full academic programmes, but to secure targeted cooperation in selected parts of semiconductor education, with a focus on practical skills that employers say are in short supply. Business Standard reported that the government sees even partial involvement from the foreign institutes as useful, because it would enlarge the pipeline of engineers, technicians and shop-floor staff available to industry.
The proposal comes against the backdrop of Semicon 2.0, the government’s second major semiconductor push. The Prime Minister’s Office said the cabinet has approved a package worth ₹1,27,500 crore to support the wider chip ecosystem, including design, fabrication, advanced packaging, equipment, materials, research and talent development. Business Standard and Mint both reported that the new phase also extends support to suppliers of raw materials such as minerals and gases used in chipmaking.
That wider policy effort reflects a simple constraint: factories can be built faster than the skilled workforce needed to run them. India’s chip companies already send employees overseas for training, including to Taiwan, Japan and Malaysia, but officials told Business Standard that this will not be enough on its own. The article said students and engineers still need exposure to live manufacturing plants, whether in wafer fabrication or assembly, testing, marking and packaging facilities, if they are to handle production environments safely and efficiently.
ITRI has long been linked with Taiwan’s semiconductor sector and, according to Business Standard, helped nurture companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and United Microelectronics Corporation. The institute told the newspaper that it continues to follow developments in India’s semiconductor industry and talent development, while A*STAR did not respond to questions. The proposed centres would therefore add to, rather than replace, existing overseas training links, but their success would depend on whether the curriculum matches factory needs and whether trainees can eventually gain experience in operating plants. Semicon 2.0 is designed to cover that broader ecosystem, but the training element now looks set to become one of the most practical tests of the policy’s ambitions.
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