An Indian edtech startup has secured $210 million in fresh financing amid a tough funding environment for edtech companies in the country.
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Indian filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma is ditching human musicians for artificial intelligence, saying he’ll use only AI-generated tunes in future projects, a move that underscores AI’s growing reach in creative industries. The filmmaker and screenwriter, known for popular Bollywood movies such as “Company,” “Rangeela,” “Sarkar,” and “Satya,” has launched a venture called RGV Den Music, […]
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Enlarge / Parvesh Sahib Singh Verma and Virendra Sachdeva, two members of Narendra Modi's ruling BJP party, celebrate the landing of India's Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft on the Moon on August 23, 2023. (credit: Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)
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If the projects reach their goals, the approvals announced by Modi on Wednesday will put India on a trajectory to become the third-largest space power in the 2030s, after the United States and China. V. Narayanan, director of India's Liquid Propulsion Systems Center, stated this was the objective in a recent presentation, writing that India's space initiatives will catapult the country to a place "among the three important space powers in the world."
Amazon has named long-time executive Samir Kumar as the new head of its India consumer business, a month after its domestic business' head resigned.
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Myntra, India’s largest fashion e-commerce platform, is trialing a four-hour delivery service in four Indian cities, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, a dramatic acceleration from its standard 2-3 day delivery timeframe as the surge of quick commerce reshapes consumer behavior. The Flipkart Group-owned firm is piloting the fast-tracked delivery service in cities […]
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Delhivery claims Ecom Express has inaccurately represented Delhivery's business metrics when drawing comparisons in its IPO filing.
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An Indian antitrust regulator has found that Amazon and Flipkart, owned by Walmart, violated local competition laws, according to a report from Reuters. The finding presents a new challenge for the e-commerce giants in a market where online retail growth remains modest at under 15% and quick-commerce is increasingly snatching business from Amazon India and […]
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WhatsApp is now letting small businesses in India sign up for a Meta Verified badge and giving them the ability to send customized messages to customers.
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In March, India announced a major investment to establish a semiconductor-manufacturing industry. With US $15 billion in investments from companies, state governments, and the central government, India now has plans for several chip-packaging plants and the country’s first modern chip fab as part of a larger effort to grow its electronics industry.
But turning India into a chipmaking powerhouse will also require a substantial investment in R&D. And so the Indian government turned to IEEE Fellow and retired Georgia Tech professor Rao Tummala, a pioneer of some of the chip-packaging technologies that have become critical to modern computers. Tummala spoke with IEEE Spectrum during the IEEE Electronic Component Technology Conference in Denver, Colo., in May.
Rao Tummala is a pioneer of semiconductor packaging and a longtime research leader at Georgia Tech.
What are you helping the government of India to develop?
Rao Tummala: I’m helping to develop the R&D side of India’s semiconductor efforts. We picked 12 strategic research areas. If you explore research in those areas, you can make almost any electronic system. For each of those 12 areas, there’ll be one primary center of excellence. And that’ll be typically at an IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) campus. Then there’ll be satellite centers attached to those throughout India. So when we’re done with it, in about five years, I expect to see probably almost all the institutions involved.
Why did you decide to spend your retirement doing this?
Tummala: It’s my giving back. India gave me the best education possible at the right time.
I’ve been going to India and wanting to help for 20 years. But I wasn’t successful until the current government decided they’re going to make manufacturing and semiconductors important for the country. They asked themselves: What would be the need for semiconductors, in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years? And they quickly concluded that if you have 1.4 billion people, each consuming, say, $5,000 worth of electronics each year, it requires billions and billions of dollars’ worth of semiconductors.
“It’s my giving back. India gave me the best education possible at the right time.” —Rao Tummala, advisor to the government of India
What advantages does India have in the global semiconductor space?
Tummala: India has the best educational system in the world for the masses. It produces the very best students in science and engineering at the undergrad level and lots of them. India is already a success in design and software. All the major U.S. tech companies have facilities in India. And they go to India for two reasons. It has a lot of people with a lot of knowledge in the design and software areas, and those people are cheaper [to employ].
What are India’s weaknesses, and is the government response adequate to overcoming them?
Tummala: India is clearly behind in semiconductor manufacturing. It’s behind in knowledge and behind in infrastructure. Government doesn’t solve these problems. All that the government does is set the policies and give the money. This has given companies incentives to come to India, and therefore the semiconductor industry is beginning to flourish.
Will India ever have leading-edge chip fabs?
Tummala: Absolutely. Not only will it have leading-edge fabs, but in about 20 years, it will have the most comprehensive system-level approach of any country, including the United States. In about 10 years, the size of the electronics industry in India will probably have grown about 10 times.
This article appears in the August 2024 print issue as “5 Questions for Rao Tummala.”
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