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From Chips to Capability: Why India Should Use Semiconductors to Rebuild Its Engineering Capacity

The recent buzz in India around NVIDIA’s announcements at the GPU Technology Conference 2026 (16-19 March) has largely focused on downstream effects—data-centres, AI infrastructure, and IT services. What is striking is not what is being discussed, but what is not. There is little serious conversation about building semiconductor capability itself. This gap matters. Because for India, the semiconductor question is not just about access to compute—it is about whether the country can build the engineering, industrial, and institutional capabilities that underpin it. Moving Beyond Prestige and Towards Purpose The global semiconductor race is often framed through extremes—2nm nodes, AI accelerators, technological supremacy. But frontier manufacturing is defined by: extreme capital intensity entrenched supply chains decades of accumulated know-how Competing head-on with companies like TSMC, Samsung Electronics, and Intel is neither immediately feasible nor necessarily optimal. A prestige-dri...
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From Topping to Core: How Edge AI Can Transform Indian MSMEs

Announcements at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference 2026 (March 16–19) made one thing clear: artificial intelligence is no longer content to sit as a digital overlay. The spotlight on edge platforms—most notably the general availability of NVIDIA IGX Thor for industrial physical AI, with its sensor fusion, functional safety, and real-time reliability—alongside Jetson Thor-powered systems from Advantech, AI-RAN integrations by T-Mobile and Nokia, and adoptions by Caterpillar and Hitachi Rail—signals that intelligence is moving directly into factories, machines, and devices. These are not incremental tools; they enable decisions at the point of action, where latency, bandwidth, and privacy make cloud impractical. In my earlier piece, I argued that India must move AI beyond the 'topping'—the surface-level copilots, chatbots, and workflow enhancers that dominate current adoption—and embed it in the 'cake' itself: the structural core of how industries operate, produce, e...
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Beyond the Topping: Moving AI to the Core of Indian Industry

Announcements from global technology leaders at NVIDIA's annual GPU Technology Conference (March 16-19, 2026) point towards a decisive shift in the trajectory of semiconductors and artificial intelligence. Advances in energy-efficient, specialised chips are making it possible to run powerful AI models directly on machines, devices, and industrial systems. At the same time, partnerships between AI companies and industrial software companies are embedding AI across the entire lifecycle of design, engineering, and manufacturing. These developments signal something fundamental: AI is moving beyond its role as a digital productivity layer and entering the core of industrial systems. Yet, much of today's policy thinking continues to treat AI as a "topping"—an add-on to existing digital workflows, governance tools, and enterprise software. This approach delivers incremental gains, but it misses the deeper opportunity. India's real strategic advantage lies in using AI not...
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Beyond Plug-and-Play: What BHAVYA Must Get Right

On March 18, the Union Cabinet cleared BHAVYA — the Bharat Audyogik Vikas Yojna — a ₹33,660 crore scheme to develop 100 plug-and-play industrial parks across India over six years. The announcement has received well-deserved enthusiasm in the news media. India's perennial manufacturing bottleneck has never been a shortage of investment intent; it has been the pre-production friction — land acquisition delays, clearance bottlenecks, absent utility connections — that kills momentum before a single unit is produced. A scheme that promises to resolve that friction deserves genuine appreciation. But appreciation must be matched by analytical honesty. Plug-and-play industrial parks are necessary infrastructure. They are not, by themselves, a theory of industrial transformation. Whether BHAVYA becomes a genuine inflection point in India's industrial trajectory, or another well-intentioned scheme that underperforms its promise — will depend on evolving the scheme into a broader architec...
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From Inputs to Infrastructure: Remaking India’s Fertilizer Strategy

India’s fertilizer debate is usually framed in narrow economic terms—subsidy burdens, input costs, and fiscal pressures. This framing misses a deeper structural reality: fertilizers are not merely agricultural inputs; they are foundational to food production, rural livelihoods, and social stability. In a country where nearly 45 percent of the population depends on agriculture, fertilizer availability is as critical as soil and rainfall. Without it, crop yields collapse, food inflation spikes, and rural incomes destabilize. The disruptions resulting from the ongoing war in West Asia—especially gas supply disruption—have exposed the fragility of India’s fertilizer system. The anxiety around potential shortages is not an aberration; it is a symptom of deeper structural dependence. India imports a significant share of its fertilizer requirements or the inputs needed to produce them. This makes the country vulnerable not only to price shocks but also to disruptions in global supply chains. ...
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Election Dates as Energy Assurance: Why India's Poll Announcement Signals a Quiet Iran Deal

The Strait of Hormuz shipping crisis, triggered by the escalation of the US-Israeli war on Iran and Iran's resultant retaliation, has placed unprecedented strain on global energy supplies. This narrow waterway, through which roughly 20% of the world's oil and a substantial share of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) normally flow, has become a flashpoint. Iran has imposed severe restrictions on commercial shipping—effectively blocking narrow strait—leading to stranded tankers, reduced flows, soaring war-risk insurance costs, and sharp spikes in global crude-oil and natural-gas prices (Brent crude-oil is hovering at around $100–$105 per barrel in mid-March, for example). For India, a major energy importer from the Gulf countries (about 40% of its crude-oil imports and 80–90% of its LPG imports), the disruptions have hit hard. In early March, domestic LPG prices rose sharply by ₹60 per 14.2-kg cylinder—the first hike in over a year—pushing the non-subsidized rate to ₹913 in Delhi. Com...
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Agentic AI and Indian IT: From Fear to Forward-Integration

When Y Combinator partner Tom Blomfield posted on X (on 1 March) that "the entire Accenture workforce is about to be outperformed by a 24-year-old who learned Claude Code last Tuesday", he was doing what Silicon Valley does best: collapsing a complex structural question into a punchy provocation.  The post sparked widespread debate about AI disrupting IT, consultancy, and other white-collar jobs. It was covered by multiple outlets in India (where Accenture and similar companies have massive workforces)  feeding an already anxious conversation about AI's threat to India's $290 billion IT services sector. It deserves a serious response — not a defensive one, but a strategic one. The Disruption Narrative Gets the Diagnosis Wrong The fear driving headlines like Blomfield's rests on a simple substitution logic: if AI can do what IT workers do, IT workers become redundant. This logic is not entirely wrong — it correctly identifies that agentic AI compresses the value of...
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