Tata’s proposal for setting up an OSAT in Assam to get the green light soon?

In a new development around India’s semiconductor mission, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for the Ministry of Electronics & IT, has said that the Tata group’s proposal for a semiconductor packaging plant in Assam is under evaluation. While Speaking at Digital India Future Skills Summit at Guwahati University in Assam today, Chandrasekhar said, “Assam is soon going to have a Rs 25,000-crore semiconductor packaging plant. It is a proposal from Tata that had to be evaluated.” This comes just two months after Assam Chief Minister Himanta Sarma had claimed that Tata Electronics has submitted an application for setting up an Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test (OSAT) in the state with an investment of around Rs 40,000 crore.

On December 9, 2023, Sarma posted a video on X (formerly Twitter) stating, “One good news for us that will change the environment of Assam a lot, Tata Electronics Limited has submitted an application before the government of India to set up an Electronic Centre at Jagiroad. They have submitted a proposal to the government of India with an outlay of Rs 40,000 crore. There will be assembly and packaging of semiconductor, and for that after taking to the Assam government, they are satisfied with our talks and they have applied to the government of India.”

He had also added that Tata has already told the Assam government that whether there will be an industry or not, the company will need 1,000 youth from the state. “And in anticipation of that industry, they are already going to train 1,000 youth so that if the industry is there, they can bring trained manpower and deploy them. We have also been told that it has a lot of potential, it requires a lot of manpower and it is manpower driven industry.”

Last April, Tata Son’s chairman N. Chandrasekaran confirmed during Business Today’s Mind Rush event that the company was pursuing semiconductor plans. “We will start with manufacturing. Then we'll get into assembly and packaging, then the next stage will be semiconductor testing. Then fabless, we will do the design. And then and then we get into the fab. That are the stages of integration we will go through, but probably not for a very long period, probably a much shorter cycle,” he said. He also expressed that the company was doing an entire vertical integration.

As semiconductor manufacturing involves a big investment, Chandrasekaran has figured out the plan already. “We got to make sure that we are doing the right thing and we are investing in the right node. And before that, we have our own architecture, we will have our own electrical electronic architecture. And this will be for global markets.”