The Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar is set to build a Rs 190 crore semiconductor research and training centre, named SAMARTH (Silicon and Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Research and Training Hub). The Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Gujarat’s Department of Science and Technology, and IIT Gandhinagar itself are funding the project jointly, according to DD News and BIS Infotech.
What SAMARTH will do
The hub will house laboratories for nano-fabrication, CMOS process training, semiconductor process and device design, device modelling, and integrated circuit design and prototyping, along with a device process characterisation lab for testing and quality assessment. Over the next five years, it aims to train more than 10,000 people: 5,600 undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral students, 1,500 vocational and technical education trainees, 1,000 participants in short certificate programmes, and 230 each of faculty members and industry professionals through upskilling tracks.
IIT Gandhinagar is also preparing memorandums of understanding with engineering colleges across the state, so students from institutions well beyond the IIT system will be able to enrol in SAMARTH’s training programmes at nominal fees.
Why this matters alongside the fabs
Gujarat’s semiconductor push so far has mostly been measured in factories and rupee figures. The state has drawn roughly Rs 1.24 lakh crore in investment across six approved projects under the India Semiconductor Mission, including Tata Electronics’ fabrication facility under construction at Dholera and CG Semi’s assembly-and-test plant at Sanand, which began commercial production earlier this month. Less visible has been the question of where the technicians, process engineers and quality inspectors those plants need will come from. A fab or OSAT unit needs thousands of workers trained in cleanroom protocols, wafer handling and process control, and India’s existing engineering colleges were not built with that curriculum in mind.
SAMARTH is Gujarat’s attempt to close that gap inside the state rather than import trained talent from abroad or from established semiconductor hubs elsewhere in Asia. A large share of the 10,000-plus training slots run through vocational and certificate tracks rather than IIT degree programmes alone, an effort to reach polytechnic graduates and existing industry workers as well as engineering students.
What it means for Gujarat families
For students and parents across the state, particularly outside Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar, the planned MoUs with regional engineering colleges matter more than the headline investment figure. If they materialise as described, a student at a district-level engineering college could gain access to semiconductor-specific training without relocating or paying premium fees. Specialised chip-industry skilling has historically been concentrated in a handful of metro institutes, so that access would mark a real shift. Whether it is priced as affordably as promised and rolled out on schedule is the detail worth watching, since announcements of this kind often move faster than the paperwork with individual colleges.
Outlook
Watch three markers: the signing of the engineering-college MoUs, enrolment numbers once the centre takes in its first cohort, and whether Tata Electronics’ Dholera fab and CG Semi’s Sanand plant start hiring SAMARTH’s early graduates instead of recruiting experienced staff from outside the state. A working pipeline there would be one of the clearest signs yet that Gujarat’s semiconductor bet is building local capacity, not importing it.
Sources: DD News, BIS Infotech, IBEF
This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.