India is funding a rare earth magnet supply chain whose largest buyers have already respecified around it

Twelve approved semiconductor projects and 1.64 lakh crore rupees committed, with the next phase's rules published the day before

At SEMICON India 2026, inaugurated by the Prime Minister on 17 September, the government's count reached twelve approved semiconductor projects with commitments above ₹1.64 lakh crore across six states: Gujarat, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. Four projects are in Gujarat, three of those in Sanand. Three facilities are in commercial production. Day two produced 25 memoranda of understanding. The implementation guidelines for the next phase were published on 16 September, the day before the Prime Minister opened the conference.

An Indian component maker's largest market is now Asia, and it is building humanoids

Sona BLW's Eastern markets, India and China together, moved from about 36 per cent of revenue to 56 per cent in one year. For the first time since listing, the East is the majority. The company calls it the Look East strategy and has been describing it for two years, so the direction is not new. It signed an MoU with Neura Robotics of Germany to jointly develop components for industrialising robots, cobots and humanoids. And it entered the railway segment through an acquisition, adding HVAC systems, electric control panels and air springs to a driveline business.

A supplier built around Western light vehicle programmes is repositioning around Asian volume and non-automotive motion. If you are a tier two into that chain, the qualification you hold is for a customer whose product mix and geography are both moving.

Cochin Shipyard is procuring a 20 MWh, 10 MW battery storage system, closing 13 October 2026

Cochin Shipyard is buying a 20 MWh, 10 MW grid connected battery energy storage system. Tender reference 2026_CSL_290903_1, closing 13 October 2026.

Twenty megawatt hours at ten megawatts is two hours at full power is sized to carry a process through a dip and to shave a peak. The commissioning has to happen around a working yard rather than on an empty site. It is a shorter bidder list for that reason. Integrators who compete comfortably on utility scale tenders are not automatically competent to install inside an operating shipyard.

Five years, and fifty one per cent

There are two conditions in India's Semicon 2.0 scheme: second hand and refurbished plant qualifies, provided it has at least five years of residual life. And the promoter must hold at least 51 per cent of the project company throughout the support agreement, including three years after the plant starts operating.

The first lowers the cost of entry. The second removes the usual exit route during construction. Read together they describe the kind of promoter the scheme wants, which is not the kind that planned to sell down at commissioning.

India is funding a rare earth magnet supply chain whose largest buyers have already respecified around it

An export control on heavy rare earth magnets triggered an industry-wide respecification inside a single financial year. Sona BLW re-engineered its product line to light rare earth alternatives. Eicher Motors developed heavy-rare-earth-free motors. Hero MotoCorp names ferrite and light rare earth as the substitutes it is moving to. Bajaj Auto developed alternate designs and alternate geographic sources and had supply restored by the end of September 2025. Maruti Suzuki logged the restrictions as a concentrated supply base risk.

The state's answer arrived after that redesign. A 7,280 crore rupee scheme will build 6,000 tonnes a year of integrated rare earth permanent magnet capacity, from oxide to finished magnet, across a maximum of five entities at up to 1,200 tonnes a year each, with dedicated corridors in Odisha, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Of that, 6,450 crore rupees follows sales and 750 crore rupees follows plant.

A domestic magnet supply chain is being funded at the moment its largest buyers have engineered part of their demand onto ferrite, which uses no rare earth at all.