Doesn’t chip fabrication require enormous amounts of water? How’s that going to play out when India is expected to start facing serious water availability issues?
Water Availability is a local issue largely isolated to the Deccan Plateau (Telangana, interior Andhra Pradesh/Rayalseema, interior Karnataka, interior Tamil Nadu, interior Maharashtra, southern Madhya Pradesh) and northern Rajasthan.
Also, fabs tend to reuse water (as there are purity requirements so you'd be stupid from a margins standpoint to not recycle water used in a fab)
Not really.
Most chips that India's MIC uses that aren't domestically fabricated comes from Tower Semiconductors' fabs in Israel, and the India's Eastern Naval Command has near complete control over the Eastern half of the Indian Ocean as there are massive naval and listening posts in Madagascar, Tanzania, Djibouti, Oman, UAE, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Kerala, etc
--------
Also, Guided Munitions have been manufactured in India since the 2000s.
Israeli ballistic missile manufacturers like Rafael, IAI, Elbit, etc did a 100% IP ToT to Indian PSUs and private sector defense contractors when the Chinese MIC was sanctioned for Tiananmen in the 90s.
There was a whole corruption scandal over this in India that lead to the collapse of the Vajpayee Administration, and had some blowback in Israeli politics in the 2000s as well.
India's Eastern Fleet is not equipped to defeat a near-peer blockade.
> Guided Munitions have been manufactured in India since the 2000s
Yes. A critical input are semiconductors. That said, none of this is novel--which is why onshoring production has been a long-term priority.
What near peer is going to blockade the Eastern Indian Ocean?
Outside of a couple of relatively minor naval and listening posts, the PLAN doesn't have a significant footprint in the Eastern Indian Ocean.
> A critical input are semiconductors. That said, none of this is novel--which is why onshoring production has been a long-term priority
Agreed, but you don't need leading edge nodes for this use-case, and India has been leveraging Tower Semiconductors fabs in Israel for this use-case for over 20 years at this point.
P.S. How did you use italics? That's actually p cool
This isn't how one plans for geopolitical risks. Each of the world's limited global and multi-regional blue-water navies (U.S., Russia, China, the U.K. and France) have the unilateral power to shut down India's economy. That's real leverage.
> Outside of a couple of relatively minor naval and listening posts, the PLAN doesn't have a significant footprint in the Eastern Indian Ocean
Agree. But it's clearly developing its capabilities. Not a coincidence that a ring of naval bases are cropping up around India.
> How did you use italics?
Put the text between asterisks.
People love to assume policymakers spend months and years on Grand Strategy, yet in action most of the hypotheticals that come up just don't make sense. It's not some big game of Civ or Risk.
> blue-water navies
PLAN is not a blue water navy yet and by most standards won't be for the next 7-8 years.
> Not a coincidence that a ring of naval bases are cropping up around India
Agreed, and it's not like India doesn't have similar bases in the Eastern Indian Ocean or in the SCS as well.
Whether anyone is acting on or mitigating a risk doesn't change the risk's existance. A good way for a country to lose its sovereignty is to assume its risks won't be capitaised on.
> PLAN is not a blue water navy yet and by most standards won't be for the next 7-8 years
That's proximate.
> it's not like India doesn't have similar bases in the Eastern Indian Ocean or in the SCS as well
Bases are an asset. Not immunity. If someone needs to coerce India, threatening or deploying a blockade (ideally, on energy) remains a capital way to do it.
Barring building and maintaining one of the largest navies in the world, India's only real remedy to the situation is onshoring production and reducing energy import dependence. (Though, as you say, that's no guarantee it will be done.)
The issue is bad maintenance of rural agricultural water infra due to political promises 10 years ago for 100% free water for farmers in Punjab, and negotiating with neighboring Himachal Pradesh and Jammu Kashmir over water rights.
The Modi government is not known for its long-term thinking - in fact, they are very bad planners as they don't have the requisite experience. Their whole approach to running a government is to treat it like a corporate business - "hey, this thing will make us money and create good PR for us, let's do it!". They have no vision for capacity building. Look at the whole electoral bond scam the Modi government ran and used to enrich themselves - it was legalised corruption worse than the corporate lobbying that exists in America. They even combined it by giving lower ranking IT official (who tend to be more corrupt) extra-ordinary powers of investigation, and draconian powers to the Enforcement Directorate to seize property and used both to extort money from questionable and / or corrupt businesses.
The last 10 years of Modi rule has seen the largest transfer of wealth from the public to the rich, with Modi personally acting as the middle-man and raking money from it too.