New Delhi, March 9 -- India is working towards becoming independent in designing and producing sophisticated microchips under its semiconductor mission, while also attracting Indian professionals with chip-design experience at multinational companies (MNCs), Niti Aayog member Vijay Kumar Saraswat said. Saraswat, who is also the chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University and a former secretary of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), said that it is a well-established fact that Indian designers contribute to virtually every chip produced globally. However, their work is primarily for MNCs, and they are often limited to designing subsystems or specific components rather than complete system designs. "As a result, while India has a large number of designers in this sector, there are very few who can do ab initio design of a complete system. There is an effort being made today that we will build this capability using those designers who have worked for MNCs so that India also becomes a fully independent chip designer. That effort is being made under the semiconductor mission," Saraswat said in an interview with Mint. Saraswat also said that specific features and the incentive structure under the second phase of the India Semiconductor Mission announced in Union budget 2026 are being worked out. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the second phase of the mission in her budget speech in February to scale up India's capabilities in equipment, materials, design, intellectual property rights and to fortify the supply chain. In the budget for 2026-27, the Centre announced a second tranche of incentives under the mission, five years after rolling out the first Rs.76,000-crore programme. India will also strive to explore and produce select critical minerals found domestically despite their low resource intensity making them costlier to extract, to guard against the risk of supply denial by other countries, Saraswat said. India's push to build domestic capabilities in semiconductors and critical minerals, which are vital for IT, clean energy and defence sectors, comes at a time tech is increasingly shaping industrial and military power in a de-globalising world. Vinod Sharma, chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industry's national committee on electronics manufacturing, called semiconductor mission 2.0, which aims to build a self-reliant semiconductor ecosystem, a path-breaking initiative....