Assam's tech dreams run on water that drowns it every year

**Snigdha Sharma** (0:00)
Assam is one of the most water-rich states in India. The Brahmaputra and its tributaries give it water in a volume that few other places can match. And the state has begun to sell this abundance to the industry that prizes it the most.
Semiconductors. And the pitch seems to be landing. Tata Electronics is building the country's first chip assembly and test plant at Jaggi Road, worth around 27,000 crore rupees, and built to package about 48 million chips a day. Now just to clarify, this particular plant is not really a heavy water user. It packages and tests chips, which is the light end of the industry. The water-hungry side lies elsewhere in chemical plants that feed chip making, which need large and dependable volumes. Chemicals are a part of what Assam is now coating, as it tries to build a deeper semiconductor ecosystem around the Tata anchor. Those are the operations that will test whether the state's water is truly an advantage. The most committed suitor in all of this happens to be Japan. Its interest reaches well beyond one plant. Japan has courted the northeast of India for years, financing road networks and a project built as India's longest river bridge, now under construction. And Assam is the centerpiece. Some analysts see the state as a link between Japanese supply chains and the Bay of Bengal and as a gateway close to the chip packaging hubs of Taiwan and Southeast Asia.
Parts of this relationship are actually already concrete. The Japanese power chip firm ROHM has signed on as a customer for the Tata line. And Tokyo Electron is supplying its equipment.
After July's India-Japan Summit, the engagement has widened. And Mitsubishi Chemical Group's executives even met with the Chief Minister Himant Biswas Sharma to explore semiconductors and chemical engineering, which is the water-intensive piece of this puzzle.
The ambition stretches far past factories. Japanese money is going into clean energy and into language centers that train young Assamese for jobs in Japan.
And Toho Koki, a Japanese semiconductor tech firm, is also running a chip research tie-up with IIT Guwahati. Now, this pull actually runs both ways. An aging, capital-rich Japan wants younger workers and trusted places to make things, and a young, underemployed Assam wants industry and jobs. Taken together, it positions Assam as a possible manufacturing and logistics gateway to Southeast Asia. And this whole case depends a lot on one asset, which, as you know, is water. And water is exactly where Assam's record turns against it. The same rivers that fill the pitch are the ones that overflow it the most years. This July, the state has faced some of the worst flooding in years. As I record this, the death toll in Assam floods has crossed 75 people, with close to 100 missing. The state disaster authority reported more than 7 lakh people affected across about 10 districts and tens of thousands of hectares of crop land underwater. Tens of thousands of people are also being sheltered in relief camps. In Jaggi Road, which is the town beside the Tata Chip plant, heavy rain has flooded the streets and reached the railway station.
What is troubling is that none of this was actually a surprise. Assam floods nearly every monsoon and has done so for as long as records exist. Its own disaster authority traces severe floods from the 1970s to the present, with heavy flooding in recent years, including 2020, 2021 and 2022
Each year, the rivers rise past the danger mark, embankments fail, farmlands drowned and families have to be moved into camps.
Then, the water recedes and the following year, it's the same story again.
And this is the contradiction at the heart of Assam's bet. The water that it is relying on for all its industrial and tech ambitions is the same water that it has never learned to hold back.
Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host, Snigdha Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varghese and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Thursday, the 30th of July.
So, how serious is this really? Serious enough that two governments are putting extraordinary amounts of money behind it. In a written reply in the Assam Assembly, the state industry's minister said that the Tata plant would receive more than 14,000 crore rupees in incentives. A little over 10,000 crores from the center and nearly 4,000 crores from the state. This is one of the largest support packages under India's national semiconductor mission, sitting on top of Tata's own 27,000 crores. For a state whose industrial base has always been thin, this is a different level of a bet.