A spec sheet [PDF] suggests it’s not going to help India’s chip industry fly very far or fast: a 100Mhz, 32-bit chip, built on a 180nm process and using a proprietary instruction set is not going to excite offshore buyers. Nor does it demonstrate the exceptional manufacturing capabilities, or the ability to produce chips at scale that foundry customers seek.

I am assuming the modest specs are also tied to radiation hardening requirements and so on. As the article mentions Indian companies have developed RISC-V processors.