Every few years, a country discovers semiconductors. The discovery usually follows the same arc: alarm at dependence, a wave of incentives, and then a slow education in just how long the supply chain really is.
India is in the middle of that education now. The ambitions are real, the incentives are large, and the obstacles are not primarily financial. They are physical, institutional, and above all temporal: a leading-edge fab is a ten-year project that must survive several political cycles to exist at all.
The honest question is not whether India can compete at the frontier — nobody starts at the frontier — but whether it can build durable competence in the unglamorous middle: packaging, testing, mature nodes, power electronics, and the design talent that feeds all of it.
That is less headline-friendly than a fab announcement. It is also how every successful semiconductor ecosystem in history actually began. The chip century will be won by whoever has the patience to build the boring parts first.
