India Diagnosed the Disease and Asked the Patient to Cure Himself
Why India fail to invest in Research and Development
Article By Nitin Jaiswal | AgeTech Leadership Labs
India does not spend enough on research, and for the first time the explanation is arriving from the top of the building. The country’s Chief Economic Advisor has set out, carefully and with citations, why the private sector will not close the gap. The market at home is too easy to make competition urgent. The colonial inheritance bent the economy toward trade, not invention. Corporate India financialised before it industrialised. And a competitive democracy applies a high discount rate to any payoff a decade out.
Four causes, all real, all sourced. The room nods. We have stopped saying India cannot afford its science; we now say, correctly, that the deficit is structural and cultural, not fiscal. The diagnosis has matured.
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The same government has also built the instrument meant to fix it. The national research foundation targets ₹50,000 crore over five years. Of that, the state has committed ₹14,000 crore.
The remaining ₹36,000 crore is to come from private donations.
That is roughly seventy percent of the country’s flagship research corpus, expected from the same private sector the government’s own economist has just finished proving will rationally decline to fund the long horizon. One arm of the state demonstrates that no firm answering to shareholders will bankroll a ten-year payoff. The other arm builds the nation’s research future on the assumption that those firms will voluntarily supply most of it. Both documents are serious. Neither disputes the numbers in the other. Nobody has put them in the same room.
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There is an innocent reading, and it deserves a sentence. Perhaps the private line was only ever catalytic seed money the exchequer always meant to backfill once the first results landed. If a committed government backstop exists, there is no contradiction, only a financing sequence. But none is written into the Act or the funding notifications. And the separate ₹1 lakh crore “patient capital” fund sitting alongside it is structured as a loan from the public purse capital the taxpayer expects to recover not the unrecoverable bet that owning a long horizon actually requires. Patience the state can call back is not the same as ownership.
The state proved the private sector would not fund the long horizon and then built the national fund on the assumption that it would.
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Look at why the horizon goes unfunded, and the four sophisticated causes collapse into one plain one. A firm answers to quarters. An executive answers to a vesting schedule. A minister answers to an election. The treasury answers to a budget year. Research answers to none of them it pays out in a decade, to whoever happens to be in the chair when it does.
No actor in the system holds a clock long enough to own the asset. The architecture assumes someone will carry a cost whose return arrives after every one of them has moved on. So the cost sits on no ledger, and the gap that everyone can measure is owned by no one.
The cleverest of the four causes does the quiet work here. Underinvestment, the argument finally concludes, is “the correct pricing of genuine uncertainty.” That single move reclassifies a gap someone could close into a tragedy everyone can only mourn. A choice becomes a weather pattern. And weather is nobody’s fault.
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So the failure is not that India cannot see the problem. It has named it, sourced it, and chartered a statutory body under the Prime Minister to address it. The failure is narrower and harder to reach. The system was never built to hold a horizon this long, so it created an owner on paper and then declined to fund it handing the bill to the one actor its own diagnosis says will not pay. It is worth asking, too, whether the firms most comfortable inside a protected domestic market have much appetite for bankrolling the frontier competition that funded research would eventually produce — a question the diagnosis raises in passing and then leaves alone.
This is not a general complaint about budgets. The figures are specific: ₹14,000 crore committed against ₹36,000 crore assumed, in a named fund, under a named Act, chaired by a named office. The cost is specific. And the silence is structural, not polite because the honest answer locates the contradiction inside the same government that wrote both halves of it.
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None of this makes funding architecture the only constraint. India is also short of researchers, short of the university-industry links that turn money into capability, short of the absorptive capacity that would let a fully subscribed fund actually spend well. All true. But notice that those constraints are debated everywhere in every think-tank paper, every policy column, every panel on why the money problem is not really a money problem. The thing that is argued about constantly is not the thing being ignored. The funding contradiction is. It is the piece no one puts in the same room, precisely because the others are so comfortable to discuss.
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The cost is not abstract. Picture one of the roughly eighty-five thousand Indian researchers now working abroad. Trained at public expense. Gone because no institution at home could offer a horizon long enough to stake a career on. India has 262 researchers per million people. South Korea has more than eight thousand. Every departure lowers the density that would have made the next cohort’s funding productive and over two decades the shortfall stops being a line on a chart and hardens into a ceiling. When India falls short of its 2047 ambitions, the ceiling will be read back as proof that “the private sector wouldn’t step up,” which is exactly how the diagnosis pre-emptively frames it.
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There is a country that did this in the right order. South Korea which the op-ed itself cites financialised only after decades of compounding real returns on research. The mechanism worth importing is not that Korea admired science. It is that the Korean state acted as the patient owner of first resort during the capability-building phase, carrying the long horizon on its own balance sheet until private returns matured. Only then did private R&D climb past seventy percent of the total.
Korea built the owner first and let the private share grow into it. India has assumed the private share at the outset, before the capability exists to make private patience rational. It inverted the sequence and called the inversion a strategy.
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So before the next foundation is chartered, the next corpus tabled, the next mission launched, there is a prior question prior because answering it would bind a named office to an outcome it currently gets to share, defer, and survive.
In the room where that ₹36,000 crore line was written the budget meeting, the cabinet note that fixes a target and assumes a donor when the donations come up short, as the government’s own economist has explained they will, whose horizon was it ever supposed to be?
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I write about the consequential truths that are visible, evidenced, and systematically unaddressed in the rooms where decisions get made. If you’ve sat in one of those rooms, I’d like to hear what you saw. Join the conversation at Tuskers.
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The Black Elephant: A 7,500-step truth in a 10,000-step world — Nitin Jaiswal, AgeTech Leadership Labs, Singapore, 2026.