India and the Netherlands can collaborate in research for using lab-grown diamonds to produce semiconductors, S Krishnan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, said on Thursday.

Addressing the CII Indo-Dutch Tech Summit, he said that the traditional business of lab-grown diamonds provides a common linkage between the Netherlands, Belgium and India’s Surat district.

“People now believe that diamond and lab-grown diamonds themselves can be a very useful substrate for semiconductors. That’s an area of research which can actually be encouraged. Some of it is also based in the Netherlands, and some of it, of course, based in India and Surat and other places. So clearly, there are many, many areas that we can collaborate in,” Krishnan said.

Krishnan said that the way lab-grown diamonds can actually be sliced is something very similar to the space of growing silicon carbide crystals and other crystals used in the manufacturing of semiconductors.

He highlighted that in India most of the research expenditure has been done so far by the government and industry expenditure on research, but hasn’t met those goals primarily because most of the companies are engaged in providing services.

He added that India has no dearth of talent and Indians are engaged in top-level research across the world including in the latest large artificial intelligence (AI) models rolled out by firms like OpenAI and Mistral.

Limited progress

While India’s electronics production has grown multi-fold to ₹9.52 lakh crore in 2023-24 from ₹1.9 lakh crore in 2014-15, the Economic Survey report tabled in Parliament last week noted that there has been limited progress in design and component manufacturing by the industry.

Krishnan suggested that if the industry comes up with their own money then the government is even willing to provide exclusive rights for use of that technology for a while.

“We have actually more than doubled our research budget. We were spending about ₹500 crore a year, roughly about $70-80 million. Now we are all the way up to about more than $150 million in terms of research funding every year. Our goal of spending this money is more oriented towards ensuring that it goes to industry-supported projects,” he said.

He added that as a Ministry, it would be happy to support both academic institutions and industry in taking forward the research and development story, because that is where truly India’s potential lies.

Published on February 6, 2025