Interview/ Ramesh Kunhikannan, promoter and executive vice chairman, Kaynes Technology India Limited
An electrical engineering graduate from the National Institute of Engineering, Mysuru, Ramesh Kunhikannan cofounded Kaynes in 1988 with a conviction that India could, on its own, build world-class electronics manufacturing capability. Today, Kaynes operates sixteen facilities in four countries.
After the company’s landmark initial public offering in November 2022, Kunhikannan founded Kaynes Semicon, which has now completed India’s first integrated semiconductor backend facility at Sanand, Gujarat.
In an interview with THE WEEK, Kunhikannan shares his plans, the lessons from his journey and India’s semiconductor future. Excerpts:
Q/ What are your plans for expansion?
Right now, the focus is on stabilising operations, scaling up and building strong customer relationships. Over time, we want to move deeper into advanced packaging and specialised capabilities.
Q/ Do you think this venture is a model that can be replicated elsewhere in India?
Not only can it be replicated, it has to be. One assembly and testing facility in Gujarat does not make India a semiconductor nation. It makes India a proof of concept. The difference between a proof of concept and an ecosystem is multiplication—more facilities, more technology focus areas, more geographies, more players who look at what Kaynes has done and say, ‘We can do this, too—in our segment, in our state’.
Q/ Kaynes is focusing on skilled manpower—recruiting young people and getting them trained by experienced professionals from abroad. How effective is the approach?
More effective than I expected. The model works because the two groups need each other in a very specific way. The experienced professionals—many of them Indian engineers who built careers at TSMC, Intel and Amkor—carry the intuition of the fab floor. They know what a yield problem looks like before the numbers confirm it. They know which process variable to touch first when something goes wrong. That instinct is built over years of doing, not studying.
The young Indian engineers bring something equally irreplaceable. And they have something the experienced professionals sometimes have to rediscover: the ability to look at a problem without preconception. Some of our best process innovations have come from young engineers asking, ‘Why do we do it this way’, and getting the answer: ‘Actually, we don’t have to.’
The transfer of knowledge between these two cohorts is the heart of the model.
Q/ If there has to be a drastic overhaul of our curricula that factors in these new tech advancements, what do we need to do on the skilling front?
The easy answer is: update the curriculum, add semiconductor courses, build more labs. All of that is necessary and should happen. But it is not sufficient.
The deeper problem is structural. India’s engineering education system was built, over decades, to produce software engineers. That was a rational response to where the jobs were. And it produced extraordinary results—India’s software talent is genuinely world-class. But the hardware renaissance that is now underway requires a different kind of engineer, and we cannot produce that engineer by adding a few elective modules to a curriculum that was designed for a different destination.
What needs to change is the relationship between industry and academia at the foundational level. Deep, structural partnership where faculty spend time in working facilities, where curriculum is co-designed with industry practitioners, where students spend meaningful semesters doing real work in real environments.