India, July 28 -- The least photogenic part of semiconductor manufacturing has made it into national policy at last. Whether it survives contact with reality is another matter

There is a rule inside a chip factory that visitors always find strange. Do not drink the water.

It is the purest water on the premises, purer than anything sold in a bottle, and that is exactly the problem. A fab run on ultrapure water, stripped of salts, metals, dissolved gases, bacteria and organic residue until almost nothing is left. Engineers measure how empty it is by electrical resistivity, and the number they want is 18.2 megaohm-centimetres, which is a technical way of saying there is nothing in it capable of carrying a charge. Water in that state is che...