Opinion
India will have to innovate its way to developed country status
Summary
- For India to become a knowledge economy, we must reimagine knowledge creation. Ramp up government research funding and get the private sector to double down on R&D to spur innovation. Well-aimed policies and a diaspora talent luring scheme may help.
India’s frugal moon mission, Chandrayaan 3, achieved the pioneering feat of landing near the south pole of the Moon. In STEM fields—of science, technology, engineering and mathematics—India and the Indian diaspora have nearly as many Nobel laureates (two in Physics, one in Chemistry and one in Medicine) as the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese diaspora (three in Physics, one in Chemistry and one in Medicine).
Two Indians have won the prestigious Fields Medal in Mathematics (only one Chinese mathematician has done so). India participates in several global mega science projects, such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).
On this evidence and more, you might well be sceptical that India faces a challenge of higher education and innovation.
Also read: Innovating in India: Bringing Indian R&D back into focus
A closer look suggests something different. According to the QS Global ranking of universities for 2025, the highest ranked Indian university, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, ranks 118th. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru, IIT Delhi and IIT Madras are ranked in the next 150.
Apart from those IITs and IISc, of the 1,168 registered universities in India, only University of Delhi and Anna University make it to the top 500. While India files applications for about 80,000 patents a year, this is one-twentieth that of China and one-eighth that of the US.
The vast majority of universities in India do not produce any globally competitive new knowledge, preferring to remain teaching colleges and student factories.
A dirigiste higher education system ensures that even their teaching is not as up-to-date, multi-disciplinary and agile as it needs to be in this fast-changing world.
The responsibility for much of India’s innovation and new knowledge creation rests with government laboratories set up 60 or 70 years ago in emulation of a Soviet model.
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) coordinates the work of 37 laboratories that span entities such as the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, National Chemical Laboratory and Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants.
The highest-paid scientists of CSIR, who are classified as Scientist ‘H’ or ‘Outstanding,’ receive an annual compensation not exceeding ₹36 lakh ($40,000). In contrast, the minimum compensation for a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University for this academic year is $67,400.
Also read: China is the West’s corporate R&D lab. Can it remain so?
Add to this the difficulties of establishing and maintaining a world-class laboratory and the near impossible task of obtaining cutting-edge lab consumables through a thicket of red tape. It is little wonder that the most innovative minds, particularly in STEM areas, choose to live and work outside India.
This third column in a series on the need for a quantity to quality transformation in India is focused on higher education and the process of knowledge creation.
For India to progress from middle-income to developed-country status, it will not only have to adopt knowledge born elsewhere, but also contribute to the stack of new knowledge.
The countries of Western Europe, the US, and more recently Japan, South Korea and China have all moved through these stages. Other countries that have not been able to follow this path, such as Thailand, Mexico and Malaysia, remain in middle-income traps.
For India to become a knowledge economy, we must radically reimagine the way knowledge is created in the country. There are two distinct elements that need to be fixed. First, the government needs to step up its funding of fundamental research.
A Niti Aayog report says that India’s gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) is one of the lowest among large countries, at 0.7% of GDP. Second, the participation and collaboration of the private sector in funding, leading and co-creating knowledge needs to dramatically increase.
The first element may require a complete structural change in how research is conducted, by merging several labs with universities. At the very least, it will require a hybrid model of research centred on both universities and centrally funded laboratories.
There is evidence that the most creative breakthroughs in science come at an early age for scientists. This pipeline of young scientists working with older guides is impossible to replicate at scale in anything other than a university setting.
Private sector spending on R&D is a mere 0.3% of GDP, compared to 1.5% or more in many developed countries. The private share of GERD is only about 40% in India, while it is well over 70% in China, the US, Korea and Japan.
So far, few private R&D labs work on projects beyond adaptation and adoption. Private R&D spending is led by the pharmaceutical sector, with transportation a close second.
Other policy changes, such as restoring a large tax-deduction for R&D expenditure, an ease-of- doing-business initiative for lab consumables and steps to ‘unbox’ India’s patent box regime, are also required to kick-start R&D spending.
Also read: A few good actions may actually be enough to improve education
Diaspora scientists have been a critical factor in the R&D revolutions of Taiwan, China and South Korea. India could experiment with a more democratic and flexible version of China’s ‘Thousand Talents’ programme to attract the best from India’s diaspora and help catalyse an R&D revolution in India.
P.S: “From a little spark may burst a flame," said Dante Alighieri
