Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI:The global landscape is undergoing a profound transformation. Geopolitical alliances are being redrawn, economic borders are tightening and tariffs, technologies, and entire supply chains are being weaponised with impunity. In this new world order, national sovereignty has become synonymous with technology sovereignty.
The Modi Government’s response to this changing landscape has been pragmatic and ambitious. The elephant of the past is ‘tigering’ its way to the future. Over the past decade, it has laid the foundation for a modern innovation economy – expanding its digital public infrastructure (DPI), opening strategic sectors like defence and space to private enterprise and nurturing the world’s third largest startup ecosystem. Now, the PM has decided to tackle India’s Achilles heel – its chronic underinvestment in R&D.
R&D expenditure
In 2024, India’s total R&D expenditure stood at about $18 billion – under onetwentieth of China’s $450 billion, and even below Israel’s $25 billion. To achieve leadership in strategic and critical technologies, India must target at least $200 billion by 2035 – roughly 3 per cent of our projected GDP. This will require both a significant increase in Government funding and an even greater commitment from industry, which today contributes to only a third of the country’s R&D spend, the precise opposite of the global trend. The challenge is considerable – but not insurmountable.
India already has a stronger scientific and institutional base than many realise. Our leading institutions, particularly the IITs and IISc, now produce more postgraduate scholars than undergraduates. The scale and quality of R&D at these institutions has also risen sharply.
Some examples. IIT Madras has created the world’s most detailed 3D images of the human foetal brain at a resolution ten times sharper and at a tenth of the global cost. IIT Kanpur has developed an artificial heart projected to cost one-seventh the price of the current market leader. IIT Bombay has pioneered CAR-T cell therapy for cancer, slashing treatment costs for Indian patients by up to 90 per cent. And IISc Bangalore has created a brain-inspired analog computing platform with 16,500 conductance states in a single molecular film – revolutionising AI computing by replacing the binary logic of conventional machines with vastly more efficient neuromorphic systems.
Policy initiatives
This surge in innovation has been matched by the Modi Government’s policy actions. The new framework for the easeof-doing research has removed layers of approvals and given scientists greater autonomy. These reforms have been hailed by the academic community as akin to the 1991 economic liberalisation moment, ushering in a more enabling environment for innovation.
The creation of ANRF, modeled in part on the US’s NSF, is set to reshape India’s research landscape. With a projected Rs 50,000-crore budget over five years, it will fund both basic and applied research across India’s universities, colleges, research institutions and R&D labs with industry collaboration at its core. Notably, it is led by a distinguished CEO from industry, bringing a results-oriented, cross-sectoral perspective to its operations.
If the ANRF is about capacity building, the new Rs 1-lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Fund is about unleashing ambition. Easily the most transformative initiative yet, it aims to catalyse private-sector R&D investment in strategic and emerging technologies. It will offer long term, low-cost financing, including equity and hybrid instruments, to corporates, startups and FROs developing breakthrough technologies in fields such as semiconductors, quantum computing, space, biotech, energy and more.
