A billion for every chip-maker who 'makes in India,' sources say
reuters.com
reuters.com
Though you know you mostly won't win a thing, and actually lose money. Its always fun to dream up a winning scenario and enjoy in your fantasies.
That's pretty much it. Everything else damned, people are treating the voting slip as an expensive lottery ticket. Lose economically, socially and suffer on the long run, for small time thrill in a day dream.
If "Make in India" succeeds, then If "I get a high paying job", then If "Save enough".... If then , If then, If then.... Soon you are driving high end German cars, and staying in expensive Gated communities.
A few auto manufacturers - Kia, SAIC and Citroen as I recall - have also set up new plants in India since 2014, although in this sector India was quite adept before 2014 also.
0. https://www.timesnownews.com/technology-science/article/indi...
That's a bit of a stretch.
The prime majority of them just assemble from knockdown kits to circumvent India's tarrifs, and bureaucratic phone registration scheme. Though I see more of them going for a more complete assembly in a few years time.
Assemble, yes, but a lot of the components also come from India. Xiaomi, for example, source 65% of their components from India itself. Of course, the really important parts like the processor, screen, camera, etc probably come from elsewhere because AFAIK they are not made in India yet.
> circumvent India's tarrifs
Adding those tariffs was intentional and part of the "Make in India" initiative. IIRC customs duty on a phone was 1% a few years back but it is now 21%.
> I see more of them going for a more complete assembly in a few years time.
Yes, very likely. Even with automobiles, initially only assembly was done in India, but over time an entire ecosystem of industries making many of the required components spawned here.
What do you think the Indian government would have to offer the international IC community to actually attract chip-makers?
QUAD unproven, India still wants Russian S400 despite CAATSA, dependence on sourcing from Russian MIC for decades to come, working relations with Iran. That's just some medium-term geopolitical positions against India. India will have problems getting leading edge for same reasons as China. Ultimately, India is too big to ever be junior partner and be subsumed under US controlled semi. Even if India had Chinese market capacity to absorb 300B of semi imports per year, they'd still have problems getting IC deals because at that point, a rich developed India that controls Indian Ocean is much scarier than rich China that controls SCS.
IMO India should hope Chinese semi efforts + EU/SK/JP attempts to spin off de-americanized supply chain succeeds - more semi tech spreads, more access to tech via political leveraging between blocs, better chance for indigenous Indian efforts. In the mean time focus on other achievable choke points like wafers, gas production, photo resist and insinuate itself into current global supply chain. Flex it's China-balance position and try to coerce modest 28nm fab for Indian MIC and slowly build from there. Realize it took SK/TW/US 40 years to build up capabilities. China will be lucky to do it in 30. No short cuts. The elephant in the room is obviously just getting country infra / business environment in order. IMO leading industries are whole of society problems. A country with $2000 per capita and heavy brain drain needs to solve the basics first.
https://www.meity.gov.in/writereaddata/files/EoI_Semiconduct...
Semiconductors are the new food. Everyone wants to make them themselves. No one wants to depend on foreign fabs anymore.
But I'm afraid that at some point we will run out of raw metals to mine, including rare earths. There is already a shortage of lithium because of electric vehicles. Could the mass manufacturing of semiconductors squeeze global metal supplies even more? Iron, gold, cadmium, silver, platinum, titanium, these resources are finite and not renewable. Even if we run out in 10,000 years, what happens then? We need to recycle more of our old electronics, including computer chips and processors. A brilliant mind should come up with an industrial process that takes a few thousand chips and breaks them down into separate components. Turning manufactured electronics back into raw metals (except plastics, paint, and glue, which should be discarded).
Are asteroids known to contain rare earths?
This xkcd talks instead about surface area, but suggests that the Earth holds a good chunk of the mine-able volume that can fuel industry.
Now, if we could siphon off hydrogen from the gas giants and fuse them into heavier elements, we could have orders of magnitude more material to work with.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldschmidt_classification#Sid...
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110907132044.h...
I was surprised to learn that the earth is about as massive as Mercury, Venus, Mars, the moon and a few more moons combined.
Most asteroids have so little gravity that mining them out would be quite feasible.
But when these resources are "used up" it's not like they disappear (as opposed to, say, helium), and at some point in the future it will be economic to recycle them and mine them from landfills.
India must have one world class city, right? If they want to compete with China, they need to kind of do something China is willing to do. Tear down an existing city and just rebuild it perfectly with infrastructure and city planning.
This is practically impossible in a democracy like India. Tearing down a city and rebuilding it will take longer than the term of any elected representative/official. The displaced people will vote him out before the plan comes to fruition.
The only way forward for us is to do things gradually. Every step must preserve citizens' liberty and rights, and remove government regulations so the people can create wealth.
If infrastructure is the problem then you must at some point face the music and pay the infrastructure debt. Otherwise you are basically not serious about moving forward. If one city gets rebuilt and becomes an economic magnet, then that should provide enough political/social capital to roll out more new cities.
I think tier 2 cities like Pune and Bangalore are good candidates. They are both expanding like crazy. It will be easy (not really, but easier) to build out the new developments with next-gen infrastructure. Once the new areas are built up and show their superiority over a few years, the older ones will be upgraded due to public pressure.
For starters I honestly believe to have genuine upgrade of infrastructure and living standards, you need to increase people's income levels. While there's steady upwards income mobility in Bangalore, it's still no where near to cause leap frog progress.
The remainder of reasons go beyond the scope of discussion of a small HN comment. They have lots to do with insane levels of corruption, and socio-economic attitudes of people. Enough money already exists, is sanctioned and spent to leap frog infrastructure to DisneyLand levels. But nearly negligible actually gets spent, needless to say the dishonesty in quality of work done.
Beyond this we just need to acknowledge nearly everyone here(including the common man walking on the street) is corrupt and just wants to loot and scoot at the expense of destroying things for everyone.
The other part just continues. Bangalore is not even a city, its really more like a mix of at-least 4 districts, gradually absorbed in to the original 'Bangalore' city. People will keep coming into the city, and jobs keep arriving. Since the already dismal state of spending, and progress. No new cities can be built in other places, so people continue to arrive. Real estate prices go up, there is no where near Sanitation infrastructure, or Electricity or even roads. But investors keep buying out lands a decade in advance. And people with no discipline or inclination to play this game just have to pay up high rents or pay 2 - 5 times the cost of a home. All this for access to schools, hospitals, career etc.
I agree with most of your comment, but I refuse to believe this is true. Almost everyone I have personally met in the city (from the auto drivers to shopkeepers to policemen to businessmen) was well-meaning and well-behaved, with an intelligent, nuanced outlook and understanding of common problems we all face.
The problems in our society are systemic, not because "people are bad". People are (in general) good and law abiding.
For example, a common conundrum I've heard about is that in any restaurant that serves alcohol, the customs/excise dept requires there to be only one exit/entry. However, fire safety code calls for multiple exits. So what is the restaurant owner to do?? He has to bribe the safety inspector, or the customs inspector, or more commonly both. The owner is not a bad, corrupt person. The inspectors are not bad, corrupt persons. The people who drafted the various codes did not draft them with an aim to encourage corruption. But combined together, all this causes the problems we see.
>>The problems in our society are systemic, not because "people are bad". People are (in general) good and law abiding.
No. Actually people are bad. Parents line up their kids for civil services exam cram schools, because civil services have ...err... bribe income potential
You know people are genuinely evil when they want their kids to grow up and become corrupt, cheat and steal.
Basically people don't want their kids to be pick pockets in a bus. They want them to dress up well, sit on a table and pick pockets in a sub registrar office or while approving a road tarring contract.
But they aspire their kids to become thieves nevertheless.
It is very common all around the world, and especially worst part of it for robber dynasties of civil officials to exists. Even rather bad places, people don't realize how shockingly common it is.
It is exceptionally hard to root out once you got few generations of those corrupt babus in power.
Very common too in Russia, where a KGB official comes to a high school to recruit kids into their "academy," and openly state the income potentials from bribes, and that with full knowledge of parents, with some even facilitating that... That's even more common with all kinds of "elite education" facilities there, whose only point is to be a gatekeepers to recruitment into government jobs. Call it a modern caste system.
Busting it means busting a double digit percentage of population who participated in such system.
Further, I was brought up in a public sector township. All the families were having one Govt job. Still only a few (1 or 2) wanted to join a govt service.
I don't want to generalize anything. Because the sample set is too small. But just want to bring a perspective. If you have seen something like 15 out of 40 wanting to become an IAS officer just to get bribed then please put the figures. This is specifically for @Kamaal.
So from my perspective, anything can happen. Obviously if certain topics just don't have consensus due to the culture, then it won't, but that's my observation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...
This is unfortunately very true. India's states derive power from the Union, and not the other way round. And the dominance of a single political party at the federal and state level during certain phases has made it relatively easy to subvert and amend democratic safeguards in the constitution.
For those curious, India's first amendment to the constitution allowed legislators to make "reasonable" restrictions on free speech after some sections of the media started criticising the newly elected government of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_of_the_Constit...
Rebuilding is important because the major population centers have already been defined. Otherwise you’d need an exodus every time a new city is built.
Can you imagine tearing down Detroit and rebuilding it from scratch? What about Seattle?
Impossible, isn't it?
India is even more democratic than USA, so it's never going to happen.
Not according to these folks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
USA is 25, India is 53.
As such, while the US has the veneer of being democratic, it really isn't.
And I haven't even gotten into gerrymandering, which makes a complete mockery of democracy.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
Strong cities develop organically. Slow evolution of the built environment has a kind of 'antifragile' nature. It prevents you from accidentally doing too much of the wrong thing at the same time, and ensures you are building things that people actually want.
Just look at some of the awful mistakes made by planners in the 20th century.
* Entire neighbourhoods were bulldozed in many American cities to make way for huge road infrastructure projects. These projects mainly displaced socioeconomically disadvantaged people and ethnic minorities, with enormous and long-lasting impacts. Decades later, it is broadly acknowledged that massive road infrastructure is toxic to cities. It causes pollution, is enormously expensive to maintain and destroys the character of a city.
* Many countries built lots of huge Le Corbusier-inspired residential towers. Since then, we have learned that the 'towers in a park' ideal is incredibly destructive to communities and the urban fabric of cities. But the allure of big towers in 3D renders is hard to overcome - China went ahead and built enormous numbers of them in the last 30 years, even though urban planners worldwide already knew how bad they were.
* We covered the countryside in endless sprawl. Houses were built around the idea that everyone must own a car and drive everywhere. Communities are too sparse to support natural urban life - shops, cafes, community spaces and so on. Real, ecologically diverse nature was razed in favour of an endless grassy monoculture.
I believe we should have some humility and stop trying to revolutionise the world's cities, thinking that we know best. Instead, we should stick to improvements that we know definitely work. Transit-oriented development. Dense, walkable neighbourhoods. Quality green space for all. Elimination of private cars from city centres. Reliable electricity and clean water. District heating. Sustainable urban drainage. Strong environmental protection for bodies of water. And so on.
I'd say it worked well, and is not anything "unsustainable." Tell how exactly it is "wrong"
* They eliminate a lot of street life. Towers almost always have completely dead frontages at ground level - and they are unlikely to be directly adjacent to a real street. You will be driving to a mall - private space that has none of the democratic nature of a public street.
* They often reduce the connection between neighbours. Meeting someone in a lift or a corridor isn't the same as stopping to talk to someone in the street.
* The 'parks' are normally poor quality. Humans tend to feel more comfortable in enclosed spaces[1], whereas the parks are open fields that feel overshadowed by the large towers.
* The parks often feel unsafe too. A significant reason for this is that towers eliminate most of the 'eyes on the street'. You are likely to feel much safer walking past a row of terraced houses than between tower blocks at night.
* The buildings are often poorly built/maintained and become eyesores.
* They are often built in conjunction with wide roads and excessive parking.
Most countries have a good example of how housing towers go wrong. France has its Grands Ensembles - many of which are really cool buildings but which have not aged well[2]. Glasgow is now demolishing many of its towers[3]. Here's an in-depth report from Create Streets, a social enterprise that studies this kind of thing in the UK[4].
For balance, there is a more positive example in Vienna's social housing[5].
[1] https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/getting_enclosure_right_creati... [2] https://favelissues.com/2018/01/22/les-grands-ensembles-a-so... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/22/disappearing-... [4] https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/cre... [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6DBKoWbtjE
The idea is to build relatively dense housing, but at a human scale - mostly 3-5 storeys. Combined with narrow streets that support walking and cycling, this creates enough density to support a 'real' city centre with shops, restaurants, offices and so on.
I think these videos convey the idea well:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o
Of course, this is not to say that you _can't_ build other kinds of housing. But many cities are badly balanced.
Chinese super/megablock urbanism connects to sufficient public transit and work mostly as planned. Add residence community governance layer (coordination mechanism for managing Wuhan covid lockdown) and you have a fairly functional setup, good civic participation especially in newer blocks with more mix-use at ground floors. It's a working urban model for megacities for massive countries, and one that would apply particularly well with India's density, flat terrain, assuming India can overcome infrastructure / transit deficit. Less proven strategies being explored now are managing internal migration and urbanization to growing tier2/3 cities to balance development.
But for a developing country with poor infra/housing stock, it might be developmentally prudent to just start spamming high density urbanism to get the ball rolling. There's enough cheap excess labour in India for generations to fix things up after the fact. But IMO India's problem is she's not ready to urbanize when huge % of population are farmers. Caste system fucked development priorities, too much focus on information services that employs the privileged few versus low end manufacturing opportunities that employs the masses. $2000 per capita and lack of development causes 700,000 infant mortalities per year, India needs coal plants and factories to alleviate poverty before it can afford sustainable cities. At least transition enough farmers to factory work to reduce stubble burning and justify the excess pollution.
Lol what? We warn against big-bang software rewrites because shit always goes wrong. But you're confident rebuilding a city perfectly is no big deal?