New Delhi, June 26 -- India's electronics industry needs to make a deliberate bet on design, and it needs to make it now. Every capability this country has ever built in technology was a result of going deeper than what was immediately needed. The ones who waited for the market to pull them towards the next layer arrived late. That must not happen again.

You don't jump from importing technology to owning technology overnight. You build capabilities one layer at a time. Today's question is whether the industry knows which layer it is on, and whether it is building the next one with intent or simply waiting for circumstances to push it there.

A generation of engineers spent years working on some of the most complex technology challenges o...