The next war may begin long before the first missile is launched. It may begin with an export licence denied in another capital, a shipment delayed at a foreign port, a fabrication line disrupted by conflict, or a specialised material that suddenly becomes unavailable. A modern fighter aircraft, radar, missile, satellite, drone, secure communications network, or artificial intelligence system can contain thousands of components. If even a small number of critical chips cannot be replaced, the value of the larger platform can fall dramatically.
That is why India’s semiconductor debate should no longer be treated primarily as a discussion about industrial policy, investment incentives, or electronics manufacturing. It is increasingly a question of national resilience, freedom of action, and strategic sovereignty.
I have chosen to focus on semiconductors because they are currently in the headlines and at the centre of an important debate in India. But the semiconductor sector is best understood as a case study rather than an exception. The same strategic question applies wherever an external dependency can become a national vulnerability during a crisis: defence subsystems, telecommunications, energy storage, artificial intelligence infrastructure, critical minerals, advanced manufacturing equipment, and selected medical technologies. The chip is a particularly visible example because it sits inside almost every modern system. The underlying issue is broader: how much dependence can a rising power safely carry in sectors that determine whether the state can continue to function under pressure?
The warning from the Defence Research and Development Organisation this week was unusually direct. At a curtain raiser for the Emerging Science, Technology, and Innovation Conclave, senior DRDO officials argued that India cannot be secure if a defence system is described as overwhelmingly indigenous while the small remaining share contains technologies without which the system cannot operate. Their semiconductor message was equally clear: future conflicts shaped by artificial intelligence, cyber capabilities, space systems, and autonomous platforms will expose weaknesses in technology ownership and supply chains much faster than traditional procurement thinking assumes.
The paradox is striking. DRDO officials said that India hosts roughly 20 percent of the global chip design workforce, yet the country remains heavily dependent on semiconductor imports. This distinction matters. Design talent is a major national asset, but design capability is not the same as control over fabrication, equipment, materials, packaging, testing, intellectual property, and assured supply. A country can be deeply integrated into the global semiconductor economy and still remain strategically vulnerable at critical points in the value chain.
The scale of the challenge is also growing quickly. Government projections released in September put India’s semiconductor demand at about US$110 billion by FY2030 and above US$200 billion by FY2035. India spent almost US$150 billion on semiconductor product imports between FY2017 and FY2025. On the same trend assumption, annual imports could rise to as much as US$240 billion by 2035. That figure should not be read only as a trade statistic. It is an indicator of the scale at which technological dependence could accumulate if domestic capability does not deepen alongside demand.
Yet precision is important. India does not need, and realistically cannot build, a completely self-contained semiconductor industry. No major economy controls every segment of the global value chain. The United States is exceptionally strong in design, intellectual property, and electronic design automation; Taiwan and South Korea are central to advanced fabrication; Japan and Europe hold important positions in materials and equipment; and the Netherlands is indispensable in advanced lithography. The objective for India should therefore not be autarky. It should be strategic sufficiency: enough domestic capability, technological ownership, supplier diversity, trusted partnerships, and reserve capacity to prevent a small number of external chokepoints from paralysing critical national functions.
This is also broadly consistent with the direction set out by NITI Aayog. Its May 2026 roadmap does not promise complete semiconductor self-sufficiency. Instead, it proposes a more credible path: chip self-sufficiency of 15 to 25 percent of domestic demand by 2030 and 35 to 50 percent by 2035, while raising value chain self-sufficiency to 55 to 70 percent by 2035. It also calls for India to build a US$120 billion to US$150 billion semiconductor value chain and to become globally significant in areas such as advanced packaging, semiconductor design, and wide bandgap technologies. That is a more useful strategic framework than the politically attractive but economically unrealistic idea of producing everything at home.
India is no longer starting from a blank page. The first Semicon India programme was backed by an outlay of ₹76,000 crore. Semicon 2.0, approved by the Union Cabinet on 15 July 2026, carries an outlay of ₹127,500 crore and extends the policy focus across chip design, fabrication, advanced packaging, research, talent, equipment, materials, and gases. As of July, twelve manufacturing projects had been approved with investment commitments exceeding ₹1.64 lakh crore, and three facilities had begun commercial production. The Tata Electronics fab at Dholera, being developed with technology support from Taiwan’s PSMC and with cooperation from ASML, is particularly important because it moves India beyond assembly and packaging towards front-end wafer fabrication.
But the number of factories cannot become the measure of success. A fabrication plant can still depend heavily on imported process tools, specialised chemicals, wafers, gases, software, spare parts, and foreign technical support. The correct question is therefore not simply whether a chip is made in India. For critical technologies, India must also ask who controls the design, the intellectual property, the manufacturing process, the equipment, the maintenance knowledge, and the replacement supply chain.
This distinction is especially important in defence. Public discussion often gravitates towards the most advanced process nodes and high-performance artificial intelligence processors. Those technologies matter, but military resilience also depends on a much wider set of components: microcontrollers, power semiconductors, sensors, memory, radio frequency devices, FPGAs, data converters, and chips used in radar, electronic warfare, guidance, and secure communications. Many of these do not require the smallest process node. What they require is reliability, qualification, long-term availability, and trusted supply.
India should therefore create and continuously update a national map of critical semiconductor dependencies. For major defence platforms and essential infrastructure, the government should know which components are mission critical, where they are designed and fabricated, whether substitutes exist, how long existing inventories would last, and which components could be redesigned or produced through domestic or trusted partner capacity. The objective is not to publish sensitive details. It is to ensure that procurement, industrial policy, and national security planning are working from the same risk picture.
Such a map would also help India distinguish between commercial efficiency and strategic necessity. In peacetime, buying from the cheapest qualified supplier may be entirely rational. In a crisis, however, price is secondary to availability. A component with no substitute, a single overseas supplier, and a twelve-month replacement cycle is not merely a procurement item. It is a strategic exposure. The digital era requires governments to think about critical electronic components with some of the same discipline traditionally applied to ammunition, fuel, spares, and strategic reserves.
A second priority is deeper ownership of intellectual property. India’s design workforce gives it an advantage that many countries would spend decades trying to build. The next step is to convert more of that engineering capability into Indian-owned architectures, system-level intellectual property, specialised processors, communications devices, power electronics, and defence relevant components. Value is created not only by where a chip is manufactured but also by who controls the knowledge that allows it to be redesigned, upgraded, verified, and reproduced.
A third priority is selectivity. India should resist the temptation to chase leadership in every segment simply because another country dominates it today. NITI Aayog’s emphasis on advanced packaging, mature and specialty nodes, compound semiconductors such as silicon carbide and gallium nitride, and frontier design is strategically sensible. A country gains leverage not by copying the entire global industry but by becoming exceptionally capable in selected areas that matter to its economy and that other countries also need.
That principle leads to an important point about strategic autonomy. Autonomy does not mean isolation. In semiconductors, isolation would be both expensive and technologically counterproductive. India should deepen cooperation with the United States, Japan, the European Union, Taiwan, Singapore, the Netherlands, and other trusted technology partners. It should use those relationships to accelerate access to equipment, materials, process knowledge, research networks, and global markets. But partnerships should multiply Indian capability, not replace it.
The same logic applies well beyond semiconductors. India’s long-term strength will depend on identifying the limited number of external dependencies that could cause disproportionate damage in a crisis and then reducing or diversifying them before the crisis arrives. The goal is not to manufacture every product domestically. It is to ensure that no foreign government, single supplier, narrow shipping route, or inaccessible technology can exercise an effective veto over India’s essential national functions.
This is why the phrase “Made in India,” important as it is, is not always a sufficient strategic test. For critical systems, it should be accompanied by a second question: how much of the technology is understood, controlled, maintained, and replaceable in India? Local assembly can create jobs and scale, but strategic resilience requires something deeper. It requires the ability to continue operating when normal commercial assumptions fail.
India has significant advantages. It has a large domestic market, deep engineering talent, growing electronics manufacturing, substantial public investment, and relationships across competing centres of global technology. Few countries possess all of these assets at the same time. The challenge is to convert them into a disciplined long-term architecture of capability rather than a collection of individual projects.
In the twentieth century, a country’s ability to sustain conflict was measured largely in ammunition, fuel, steel, industrial capacity, and logistics. In the twenty-first century, semiconductors belong on that list. Their physical size is tiny; their strategic consequence is not.
India should not discover the true cost of dependence only when an export licence is suspended, a shipping route is disrupted, or a foreign production line becomes inaccessible. By then, a new fabrication plant cannot be built in weeks, a specialised workforce cannot be trained in months, and intellectual property cannot be improvised under fire.
Semiconductor resilience is therefore not simply an industrial ambition. It is strategic insurance. And the larger lesson extends far beyond chips: a country that seeks genuine strategic autonomy must know which dependencies it can live with, which it must diversify, and which it cannot afford at all.