Ashwini Vaishnaw: On India’s Path to “Tech Powerhouse”

Speaker A: Welcome to Tech Unheard, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the most exciting developments in technology. I'm Rene Haas, your host and CEO of arm. Today we have a very special episode for you. I'm in Bangalore, India, joined by Ashwini Vaishnav, the Indian government's minister for Railways, Information and Broadcasting and Electronics Information technology. Under his leadership, India's electronics manufacturing and exports have grown notably and the country's first domestically produced semiconductor chip was released this fall. Minister, thank you so much for joining me.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker C: Pleasure to uh, have you and you joined us today for this grand opening which was also pretty amazing. Have you done many of these grand openings of offices across India recently?

Speaker B: Not many, but ARM is a special I had to be here and good thing is that you are doing 2 nanometer M design uh, here. So that makes it a very special occasion for me. So that's why I came here.

Speaker C: Yeah. So there's a lot of things I want to talk to you about. There's some amazing things going on with India, economic growth, the things that are going on with semiconductor initiatives in India, which has a long and rich history. But maybe I want to start Minister, with your background, uh, and your background is unique. You've been in the technology space, you've been in the private sector, but now you're a high ranking official in the Indian government. So tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got to where you are.

Speaker B: It's an interesting journey. And uh, see I started as an engineer, studied electronics and communication and during college uh itself I got hooked to semiconductors. And uh, in fact we somehow got funded in a college and invented use that to invent a uh, network printer way back. That's long, long time.

Speaker C: And what were you programming? The 8085 in that was hex. Hex assembly.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Oh my goodness.

Speaker B: It was very very difficult and it required so much focus.

Speaker C: I remember you probably still remember some of the commands I would imagine. I still remember sub 8080 80. So you started engineering university, correct?

Speaker B: Did my MTech at IIT Kanpur and during MTECH again was uh, very fortunate to work on transformer for text to sound. Actually I designed a card which was manufactured by intel and then I had to write the entire uh, database management system because there was no DBMS which would take sound as a data element. So it was very interesting and uh, very kind of at that point of time probably a very unique project. Then I got into government, worked as an IAS officer which is challenging, uh, Task in a country managed.

Speaker C: And what is that? What is. What is it for? For our listeners who may not know what. What is an IAS officer?

Speaker B: So I'm sure people in India would understand outside India. One example I can give is, like, managing a, uh, complete district in India, maybe having like 1.4 million people kind of thing, having one large city or two large cities and many small villages. So managing that practically every aspect of governance comes to you. So that's very interesting. Then I worked in the Prime Minister's office, and then I went to Wharton, did my mba, studied finance there, and came back and, uh, had a good entrepreneurial and corporate journey. And our, uh, Prime Minister gave me this very big opportunity in 2019. He got me into the Parliament. I gave this big response.

Speaker C: So you were designing text to sound, you were working on a network printer, you got your degree, your master's, yet you moved into government. What drove that choice for you at the time?

Speaker B: Uh, a lot of things happen in our lives which are driven by the context and the society of that period. Large part of it was driven by my family. My father pushed me into civil services. Um, but I was more inclined towards technology.

Speaker C: And were there aspects of your engineering background that when you got into civil service, that helped you? Uh, engineers are known to be very, very logical folks. Um, were there aspects of it that, when you look back, that served you well?

Speaker B: Served me very well. Because engineering gives you that logical way of thinking, that problem solving mindset comes, uh, when you do engineering training. And that really helped me. In fact, in one example I can give is 99 super cyclone, which came on the east coast of India. Uh, that time I was serving in a, uh, district called Balasur. I practically went into the computers of NASA and, uh, got a lot of good data and collected that together and could predict the path of the cyclones. That really helped.

Speaker C: The thing that I'm just so impressed with is you. And we'll talk about your role now, is that having that engineering training and both in terms of your education and doing work in the private sector has you rather uniquely positioned to understand the needs of the marketplace.

Speaker B: It helps me understand and it also helps me engage well with the technical world. And one can understand the challenges that we would face, and one can foresee the entire spectrum of the issues that you'll face.

Speaker C: So tell the world that's listening here your role now inside of what you do inside of Parliament, for the mystery you've got. Your title is rather unique in terms of the areas you look after, which are Quite large and broad, but just tell folks a bit about what you're doing.

Speaker B: So currently I have got three responsibilities. One is uh, electronics and it where we basically are focused on manufacturing, on um, developing uh, solutions, digital public infrastructure and on uh, creating a semiconductor ecosystem in our country. That is one and the AI, uh piece of it, AI mission. Second is railways, where we have a very large network which is more than 150 years old. Large population uses railways. So modernizing that entire network, getting it up to speed towards today's technologies. And third is information and broadcasting.

Speaker C: Let's talk about semiconductors. I started my career in the middle 1980s and at that time Japan was overtaking the United States and having a national policy around semiconductors was extremely important. And the US started a uh, consortium back in the day to address that. And then there was a period I think when the Internet boomed that semiconductors weren't seen so interesting anymore and national policy uh, waned and there wasn't just as much attention given to it. Now the world has changed for a myriad of things. When you think about it in your role, what are the things that come to mind in terms of how you think about semiconductors, both in terms of the importance to India as a country but also how you think about a national policy.

Speaker B: So if you look at it, any country which wants to be a significant player in the world must have good command over certain technologies. Semiconductor is one of them, Quantum is another, getting the capabilities to work on those technologies. Telecom is another. So it's very important that we have significant capabilities in these technologies. That's the way we look at uh, semiconductor as a major technology in our entire constellation of spectrum of technologies that we are following. We have very strong design capabilities in our country. Close to one fifth of the design talent is here in India. Global M so every large uh, global semiconductor company has good presence here.

Speaker C: Some of our best people working on the most advanced products for ARM are here.

Speaker B: Correct. And uh, really advanced chips like 2 nanometer, 3 nanometer. Some of the advanced modes are being designed here based on this design capability. We want to now get into the manufacturing. So fab atmp, the capital equipment, the materials and the finished products which is electronics. Right. This entire spectrum we are working on. So in case of semiconductors we definitely want to have a good design ecosystem further develop it, develop uh, startups which can be basically which become product companies and we want to do fabrication, the manufacture of chips, we want to do atmp. We already have 10 units under construction at this point of time as we speak, two of them are FABs and eight are uh, ATMP units. We want to also manufacture the equipment which goes into manufacturing chips and sorry

Speaker C: to interrupt you Ashvini, but when you started in 2019 in this role, when did you start to put in place this thinking about we need a national policy around semiconductors.

Speaker B: So our semiconductor mission was uh, inaugurated on the 1st of uh, January 2022. Okay, 2021 is when our Prime Minister approved the semiconductor mission. And then first January told it go, we started the mission and uh, three and a half years made significant progress.

Speaker C: And here, relative to here being in India, how does government get involved relative to the private sector, uh, the university system to distill that mission into these partners to help build the ecosystem. How does that happen here?

Speaker B: So the mission is run by professionals, technical people, people who understand semiconductors very well. They are ah, the ones who are running the entire mission. It's done in a very professional and transparent, uh, manner. Our interaction is with the multiple stakeholders, with the chemicals, the gas manufacturers, the equipment manufacturers, the designers. In terms of universities, we have tie ups within the country. We have, we are developing a very large talent pool. 278 universities we are working with.

Speaker C: So 278 universities in India. And how does the government organize that effort with universities? How does that, how does that take?

Speaker B: So we have a body called AICTE or India Council of Technical Education. That's the coordinating body. Um, under the semiconductor mission we have provided, uh, free of cost access to world's best EDA tools to the students studying in these universities. Basically we would like our students to come out of the college well prepared for the industry and also having that edge over other parts of the world.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's fantastic. And the vision is not just designing chips, but your vision is to uh, go very, very broad with this.

Speaker B: Our Prime Minister gave us the mandate to develop the entire ecosystem. So we want to manufacture chips, we want to manufacture the equipment which goes into manufacturing chips and we want to manufacture the materials which go into manufacturing chips. So the complete ecosystem we are working,

Speaker C: those are bold ambitions and I think they're the right ones. When you think about the headwinds, things that make that challenging, what comes to

Speaker B: mind when you start any industry? Uh, there certainly would be many challenges. And uh, when we started this journey, I remember my first interactions with the semiconductor professionals on the west coast of US met about 45 top CEOs and CTOs. And each time my pitch used to be, uh, we are starting a new industry and I don't know anything. So please help us understand what this industry is and what we should be doing. And everybody guided us very well. Um, I must thank each one of those 45 CEOs who helped us think through the challenges. And we meticulously looked at each and every challenge and okay, this is the problem of our power supply. Let's find out how do we mitigate this. This is a problem about a particular, very high ultra pure chemical. Let's find out how to mitigate that risk. And methodically we have been working.

Speaker C: So semiconductor, um, investment for the type that you're talking about is not a one year thing, it's not a two year thing, it's a decades kind of thing. How do you ensure that the momentum lasts decades? Given the fact that you're in a country here in India that has elections, government, uh, leadership could change. How do you think you maintain that? Sort of stick to itiveness, if you will, relative to continuing that journey, having

Speaker B: a very large ecosystem and very large number of stakeholders. One good thing about our country is once we take a direction, the momentum, once it builds up, it remains maintained for a very long period of time. And uh, when you have a very large ecosystem where everybody is partnered in the program, then it helps in creating that sustainability.

Speaker C: Are there parts of the ecosystem that you think need more investment relative to the semiconductor vision?

Speaker B: I think the chemical and gas part will require a lot more attention because the ultra pure chemicals which are required in manufacturing chips will require a lot more capabilities than we have.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think from a talent standpoint, certainly speaking for arm, uh, not only we have a huge presence here, but some of our best people here. I think there's such a rich talent base of engineers here and also entrepreneurs who are here and who have moved to other parts of the world and come back. I feel like talent is not an issue, but maybe I'm not thinking about it the right way.

Speaker B: Do you think, uh, there are two parts to this, uh, question. Basically the talent rich designs and the talent rich works in the clean rooms. So we are working on both parts of it. The design part, uh, is that pool is already available and there's a very large number of those. But the clean room, the people who work in the fab, that's where we are currently focused on so that we get the right people.

Speaker C: Now semiconductor, I want to come back to it, but I want to talk a little bit about India's economic growth. You know where that's going. It's obvious to anyone who comes here and you And I were just remarking looking outside this beautiful new office here, you could be anywhere in the world. When you looked out at these cleaning buildings, it feels like this nation is on the cusp of some hyper growth. Tell us a little bit about how you think about the growth engine of India.

Speaker B: So it's a very well thought through strategy that we are executing. Our Prime Minister has given us a very clear way forward. It's basically built on four pillars. The pillar number one is uh, investment in physical infrastructure as well as investment in uh, digital and social infrastructure. Pillar two is about focus on manufacturing and innovation. Pillar three is inclusive growth. And pillar four is simplification of so many processes and legal systems that we have all the four pillars. We are working in a very methodical way. Uh, we used to do public investment of about 30, 35 billion US dollars 10 years ago. Now we do about 140 billion dollars.

Speaker C: And uh, I'm sure that's capital investment

Speaker B: in, in uh, railways, highways, $140 billion power, in uh, building new universities, improving the suburban, uh, transportation and so many other things. Second part is focus on manufacturing and innovation. So starting from just about 300, 400 startups 10 years ago, today we have more than 130,000 startups from our country and uh, more than 100 unicorns. We are today the third largest startup ecosystem and make in India, which is part of the second pillar. We have focused a lot on manufacturing, practically everything. So electronics manufacturing we have grown six times. Electronics exports, we have grown eight times. Telecom equipment, we always used to import ever since 1950s and now we are a major exporter of telecom equipment, defense equipment we used to import, now we have become exporter. So all those things are very much well thought through. Part of the second pillar of manufacturing and innovation, third is inclusive growth. We are a very diverse uh, country, culturally, linguistically, economic growth level, all those things. So we are very, very keen on making sure that the people at the bottom of the pyramid, they get significantly good opportunities to come up and the economy, the entire society and the country should rise up as a uh, good harmonious way. So many programs, for example opening 540 million new bank accounts. So that's huge, right? And any sector like 130 million households getting tap water connection, 40 million houses uh, built for the poorer sections of the society. It's a very, very, very wide uh, program which we have taken up. Fourth is simplification. We have removed about 1,500 laws from the statute book and about uh, 35,000 compliances from the system and still that's uh, a work in progress. We are still working towards simplifying the system for this. So it's a very well thought through strategy. I can say with high level of confidence that we'll continue to grow in the band of 6 to 8% uh over next few years and then move higher in that band with very moderate inflation.

Speaker C: Oh that's just amazing. And removing m all those processes is somewhat music to my ears. I'm going to talk about AI for a bit. To what level does AI accelerate that? How does both in terms of the technology and then I'm very curious about how you and your role view using AI to enable some of the changes you're talking about.

Speaker B: India is an early adopter of AI. We are using AI in practically every sector of the economy today. We also have set up an AI mission. That mission basically does uh, three major things. First is provide common compute facility to our youngsters, to our startups and researchers.

Speaker C: What does that mean? Common compute?

Speaker B: So if you look at the world access to technology is limited to a few mhm. Uh so for example in the case of semiconductors we provided EDA tools to a very large population of students. Similarly we are providing GPUs 38,000 of them to the students, researchers, startups. So that common compute facility we created using government funds and uh, we are developing our LLMs 5 uh, teams are working on it. Then we have set up a AI safety institute which is working in a very interesting network approach which is developing a techno legal solution to AI safety. We're developing many AI based applications for our agriculture, education, healthcare, climate, uh, related applications. It's a very comprehensive program on the

Speaker C: techno legal approach towards AI. What, what does that mean kind of exactly in terms of.

Speaker B: So we think that something as complex as AI cannot be dealt with simply by passing a law, by legislating something it has to be solved in a more practical way. Practical way we think is to develop technical solutions and complement that with a legal structure. That's the way we are uh, thinking. And uh, so for example detecting a defect, how do you detect a deep fake? So uh, we have Iit Jodhpur working on a technical solution to detect deep fake with very high level of certainty. So that's an approach and we have taken many institutions as a part of this network uh rather than uh, some of the countries or some of the geographies without taking any names I would say that like they just want to legislate something and believe that the problem will be solved. Problem has to be solved in a more practical way.

Speaker C: Can it be solved through a sovereign cloud where you have control of the models, controls of the weights? Or is your view that the world is flat when it comes to this? And um, these AI models cross national boundaries and this is a global coordination that's required around AI?

Speaker B: Absolutely. It's indeed a global coordination that we will require because digital world doesn't have physical boundaries. So I think the good part of this new technology will be harnessed by our corporations, by our uh, uh, people, by our startups. But the harmful things will have to be globally coordinated. And to me it appears that over a period of next few years, the world will come to a level of understanding where people will sit together and look at solving this safety part in a more coordinated way.

Speaker C: Are you an AI for good? Are you a bear or a bull? When it comes to the benefits of

Speaker B: AI, I believe that technology does, uh, bring a lot of good things to the society. It can help us solve population scale problems. For example, one ah, of the applications we have is in detecting tuberculosis and it's very effective.

Speaker C: Absolutely.

Speaker B: Another one that we are working on is improving the productivity of our agriculture. The results are phenomenal. So I'm very practical, very rational on this topic. I would say that let's harness the benefits and let's keep our society safe from the harms.

Speaker C: Are you surprised at how fast it has moved? Uh, in terms of we had our chatgpt moment a couple of years ago and the advancement relative to whether it's video, whether it's voice queries. Are you surprised at how fast it's moved?

Speaker B: I think the trend is very clear. If you look at few decades ago, the technology cycle used to be a few years, then it shrunk to a couple of years, three years, then it shrunk to like one year. You have a totally new technology. So the technology cycles have really, really shrunk in the past. So one can really anticipate that the growth which is seen today will continue.

Speaker C: A lot of talk about it's moving so fast and then there's going to be a wave of jobs that are just going to get eliminated. And then there are folks who say with every technological advancement there's always jobs that go away, but there are more jobs that are better created as a result. And then folks say, well no, this time it's different because AI can think, AI can do the kind of jobs that certain trained leaders, white collar workers could have done. Is it something at the government level here in India gets Talked about and thought about.

Speaker B: I'm wondering. We definitely are concerned about the change which is happening in the economy because of AI and the, uh, potential disruptions in employment. Yes, that's a major point. And we think that the solution to that is to upskill our people very rapidly. We think that, for example, the large number of students that we are training in 5G technologies and large number of people that we are training in semiconductors, that same skill, we must train up people in, uh, AI, both in the use as well as in development. In fact, we have taken up a program for a million technical persons to be trained in AI. Ah, related technologies.

Speaker C: Wow. And what would be examples of those AI?

Speaker B: Multiple things at a very basic level, making sure that the data annotation capabilities are there. At a mid level, making sure that the applications can be, uh, created in India for the world. And at a, uh, bigger level on the research side.

Speaker C: Yeah, at ARM and I think really across semiconductor companies, uh, we're seeing productivity gains from AI, there's no doubt about it. But still finding very skilled engineers to do complex work around, uh, chip design, particularly some of the most complex chips in the world. We still see a need for lots of engineers as evidenced by all the growth here. Do you have a viewpoint on that? When you think about the semiconductor world, does AI, the jobs start going away in semis?

Speaker B: With AI, I think the change will be there. I think the change will bring many good aspects and there will be some, uh, parts of it which will require a lot of adjustment. Ah, what's your view on this? You see the entire world from your purge?

Speaker C: Uh, well, you know, I view AI as sort of this Star Trek thing that I did not think in my lifetime I would be able to work on it from the perspective of can machines think and solve problems? I think so long as ideas can be created to create new things, then I'm not so worried about where jobs go. It gets interesting though. When the AI gets smart enough to figure out here's the next thing you should do relative to developing a product or solving a problem, then I think it gets interesting. I am very much an AI for good, as you are as well. I think healthcare is the killer app. Uh, when you look at the amount of time it takes to do a drug trial or genomic research, having that accelerated to an incredible level is, is pretty, is pretty amazing. Um, what the world looks like in 50 years. Um, that's a great question. I would have thought that would have been a question years ago. We would have said, well, it will kind of look like the way it does today. I think that time has shrunk. I think in 10 to 20 years it's going to be a very fascinating world. But chips will be at the heart of it, there's no doubt about it. So what you guys are doing here in terms of your policy is the right one.

Speaker B: What's the change in uh, semiconductor industry that you think? What's the trend that you see where country like us, which we are, where we are starting in a new industry we should be thinking about?

Speaker C: Yeah. So in India, I think there is just so much potential to create the world's next great geography for everything you talked about because you have access to a gigantic talent pool. You have access to resources, even rare earth type minerals you have huge access to. So there's no reason, you know, over time, India cannot become a great dominant player in terms of the whole vertical infrastructure. Which is why I find what your policies are behind to be so exciting and it's so fascinating. You've gone off and had these discussions with, with all of the um, different CEOs you said on the west coast to be sitting here with a minister who can talk about synopsys and cadence EDA tools and understand where those are, that's a huge jump. Because when it starts at the top relative to an understanding of the details is a very significant thing. So I'm very excited by it. And when I come here to our office in Bangalore and I see the energy level and the passion of people to create and invent, like you said, there's an entrepreneurial spirit here that's so rich. I think there's uh, no ceiling for what India could do in this space.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: So I think it's just amazing. Thank you so much. It was wonderful chatting with you and thank you again for joining uh us today on TechUnherd and our grand opening in our new office.

Speaker B: Thank you, Rene. Thank you so much for inviting.

Speaker C: My pleasure.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this month's episode of tech unheard. We'll be back next month for another look behind the boardroom door to be sure you don't miss new episodes. Follow tech unherd wherever you get your podcasts. Until then, techunherd is a custom podcast series from arm and national public media and I'm arm CEO rene haas. Thanks for listening to techunherd.

Speaker D: Arm tech unherd is a custom podcast series from arm and national public media executive producers erica osher and shannon berner, project manager colin hart, creative lead producer isabel robertson editors andrew meriwether and kelly drake composer aaron levison. Arm production contributors include ami badani, claudia brandon, simon jarrett, jonathan armstrong, ben webdell, sophia mckenzie, kristen ray and samal shah. Tech unherd is hosted by arm chief executive officer renee haas. Sa.