Sridhar Vembu
India's rapidly evolving deep tech capability owes much to the vision and commitment of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Fifteen years ago, many of the things India is building today would have been dismissed as impractical. A private Indian company launching an orbital rocket. A semiconductor fab on Indian soil. Defence systems designed here and sold abroad. Modern trains built at home. The usual answer was that India had missed the bus, the technology was too difficult, the capital needed too large and the lead of other countries too great.
That answer was always too easy. A country does not become capable by waiting for the economics to become convenient. It becomes capable by beginning the work, absorbing the early failures and staying with the problem long enough for skills and capabilities to accumulate and compound.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi understood this early on and took action, and we are starting to see the results.
We should be clear about what self-reliance means. It does not mean making every screw at home or refusing to work with the world. It means being able to invent, engineer and improve the things we use, so we can confidently engage with the world.
Semiconductors make the point sharply. We have a large base of chip designers, but chip manufacturing has been the missing layer. The Tata Electronics fab at Dholera, is a Rs 91,000-crore project to fill part of that gap. It is designed for 50,000 wafer starts a month across mature process nodes used in automobiles, industrial systems, power devices and microcontrollers.
A working fab needs ultrapure gases and chemicals, precision tools, packaging and testing, reliable power and water, process engineers, maintenance crews and hundreds of disciplined suppliers. Beyond wafers, the most important output of Dholera will be the entire set of capabilities and know-how created that make our nation stronger.
Government support has been crucial to get us here. The Semicon India Programme offers approved projects fiscal support of up to 50 per cent of capital expenditure. By May 2026, twelve semiconductor projects had been approved across six states, with committed investment of roughly Rs 1.65 lakh crore. Semicon 2.0 extends the effort into design, equipment and materials.
We have already seen how industrial learning compounds. Mobile-phone assembly was once mocked as screwdriver work. Yet, scale changed the incentives. Between FY15 and FY26, Indian electronics production rose from Rs 1.9 lakh crore to Rs 13.11 lakh crore, while exports went from Rs 38,000 crore to Rs 4.24 lakh crore. Mobile-phone production reached Rs 6.27 lakh crore and exports Rs 2.59 lakh crore. Assembly did not make India an electronics powerhouse overnight. It did, however, create factories, workers, quality systems and a domestic market large enough to attract the next layer of suppliers.
Let us come to space. When Skyroot’s Vikram-I lifted off from Sriharikota in July 2026, the launch mattered because a private team has learned to integrate propulsion, materials, avionics, software and operations into one unforgiving machine. ISRO’s accumulated knowledge and infrastructure made that learning curve possible; IN-SPACe opened a practical bridge to it. India now has hundreds of space start-ups. Narendra Modi has inspired this space generation.
Defence imports can deliver equipment, but leave us vulnerable at critical moments. India’s defence production reached Rs 1.78 lakh crore in FY26 and exports reached Rs 38,424 crore, up from Rs 686 crore in FY14. Those numbers show the extraordinary momentum.
The India AI Mission, with an outlay of Rs 10,371.92 crore, is trying to lower one of the main barriers by creating shared compute for start-ups and researchers. That is a sensible public investment.
All this leads to a less glamorous subject: research institutions. Deep technology is full of long stretches when there is nothing impressive to show. Venture capital cannot fund such uncertainty for a decade.
The Anusandhan National Research Foundation was created to address that gap, with a planned outlay of Rs 50,000 crore for 2023–28. A separate Rs 1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation scheme is meant to support private-sector R&D in sunrise areas.
I remember when we struggled even to distinguish software services from software products. That debate now feels narrow. Young Indian companies are working on chips, rockets, drones, AI models, medical devices and advanced materials.
It is a long slog and that is why continuity in policy crucially matters. A fab, a defence platform or a research university cannot be built to an election-cycle clock. The Modi government has kept strategic technology at the core of its development agenda long enough for companies and institutions to respond.
For too long, India treated advanced technology as something to buy after others had done the difficult learning. We are now choosing to do more of that learning ourselves. That is the change worth celebrating.
(The author is the founder and former chief executive officer of the Zoho Corporation)
