A handful of firms in the photonics industry have formed the Indian Photonics Association (IPA), a grouping of firms that work on the technology. The move comes as the Union government also seeks to promote, through the India Semiconductor Mission’s second phase, the domestic manufacture of photonics products like transceivers, which sit at the end of fiber-optic cables, forming a crucial component in telecom networks and AI data centres.
Photonics has boomed particularly since AI data centres need a large number of high-speed interconnections both internally and with the outside world. “The photonics industry knew it; the others took some time to catch up,” Tarun Sibal, the founder of Noida-based CloudPhotonix, said in an interview with The Hindu in July. “The industry realised that if you are creating an AI stack, the AI stack is not just servers and data centres… How do you get the throughput for that level of compute? And I think that set the cat amongst the pigeons.”
Ashwini Aggarwal, the IPA’s inaugural director general, said that firms from across the country had joined the IPA. “India has BharatNet, which is one of the world’s largest optical fibre networks; we have ISRO, it is actually delivering optical payloads between the satellites; we have a data centre industry coming up which is just [booming],” he said in an interview on the sidelines of the launch. “We have optical transceivers and photonics-based interfaces coming up rapidly in that ecosystem. Imagine all this is happening and we don’t have a community body to actually give a voice to what is required for the industry.”
Rohin Y., an IPA board member and founder of LightSpeed Photonics, said that the need to develop the indigenous industry was urgent. “Many months ago there was one LinkedIn [post] that went viral by a photonics founder, which was taken down very soon later, with a very lengthy message which was kind of very saddening to hear — that he wanted to for six months start something in photonics in the nation and he tried and what not… He said ‘I quit. I am going to China.’ I was very much left in a bad taste,” he said at the launch.
“It was very unfortunate that they didn’t have an ecosystem to fall back [on],” he told The Hindu. “And that is what we wanted to have, where there is an end-to-end ecosystem and local supply chain, just like China has that kind of a model, where you have anchor customers who are enabling the rest of the ecosystem.”
Domestic photonics players face stiff competition from China, Mr. Sibal pointed out. “I am subject to the same price as China, because my competitor is an importer who has no physical infrastructure,” he said in July.
While IPA’s founders pitched government engagement as just one aspect, the industry may have a lot to engage the IT Ministry and other government bodies on. Mr. Sibal pointed in July to the friction-ridden process of getting his manufacturing operations going. “You go to a Vietnam or a China, they are plug and play,” he said.
“You just walk in with your brains and a little bit of your equipment and you are running. You’re not worried about how I’ll get electricity, or whether I’m talking to the transformer guy to stabilise the voltage, or writing to the electricity department to ask, will you give me the adequate supply, will I have the sanctioned load I need? Which is a distraction, because by the time you sort these problems out, you’re pushing out your actual production.”
Mr. Sibal pointed out that even though his firm had filled its order books for months — “demand is not a problem,” he insisted — bankers unfamiliar with the industry were reluctant to provide operational expenditure financing, a problem that may be affecting many players in the less noticeable parts of the electronics manufacturing industry.
The IPA said in a two-page note that it estimated the Indian photonics industry to be worth anywhere between $6.8 billion to $7.93 billion by 2031. The “value chain remains thin” on “advanced detectors, laser sources and optical engines,” the note said. Many of the components and materials used by Indian players remain imported, even as some try to indigenise production more deeply.
Published – September 09, 2026 10:41 pm IST
