India's push to build its tech ecosystem is also aimed at bringing back Indian talent working in frontier technologies abroad or at least stemming the brain drain, a top official said on Thursday.
"... a lot of chip design is about talent. A lot of the large language model generation is about talent and getting the best engineers," Neelkanth Mishra, a part of advisory committee of the Indian Semiconductor Mission and also a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the PM, said.
Pointing to the huge incentives being offered through a ten-times increase in the design-linked incentive scheme, Mishra said a person between 40 and 45 years of age who has made enough money for the kids in other parts of the world should feel like returning given the sweeteners in place here.
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He exuded confidence that there will be thousands of people who will be willing to come back.
"... the priority for us has to be to accelerate the build-up of the risk capital universe, which then will automatically make sure that the talent starts, the reverse brain drain happens, or at least the brain drain stops," Mishra said, speaking at the launch event of the Artificial Intelligence Council of India by IAMAI here.
He hinted that, rather than wafer manufacturing, where returns are very low, other aspects of the semiconductor front, like the design front, where 60 per cent of the value addition on a chip happens, are the ones India should be targeting.
However, he rued the lack of an ecosystem in place and conceded that this is making the government's job also challenging.
Citing the Rs 1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation Fund, Mishra, who is a second-level fund manager in the platform, said the panel is finding it challenging to deploy the fund.
"There is no one. Who do we give it to? I mean, there are good people, but what I am saying is not enough to absorb that one lakh crore," he rued.
Making it clear that he is not "blaming" anyone for this eventuality, Mishra said it will take time for the ecosystem to mature and explained the nuances.
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As per the fund's structure, half of the money must be raised by the fund itself, and the other half is contributed by the government. But the difficulties arise because, given the absence of the ecosystem, how does a fund raise the other half, he said.
Indian venture capital funds, which have made most of the investments in e-commerce or B2B marketplaces, do not yet have the necessary "muscle" to take value calls on high-tech.
"Our objective is to try to encourage people to come back. What we also recommended to ISM is to do road shows in the US," he added.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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