Asad Mirza
India has risen from 81st to 38th position on the Global Innovation Index in a decade, a genuine achievement. But to realise Viksit Bharat 2047, that momentum must be transformed from promising trajectory into sustained, precision-engineered technological leadership.
There is a version of India’s innovation story that reads like an unbroken triumph. India climbed to 38th position among 139 economies in World Intellectual Property Organisation’s (WIPO) Global Innovation Index 2025, up from 81st in 2015, ranking first among lower-middle-income economies and first across Central and Southern Asia. Four Indian cities – Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, and Chennai – are now recognised among the world’s top 100 science and technology clusters, and India ranks sixth globally in patent applications. The country has over 149,000 Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT)-recognised startups. Prime Minister Modi called the Global Innovation Index (GII) performance a “remarkable feat”.
It is a remarkable feat. But rankings tell only part of the story – and often the most flattering part. The harder question is whether India’s innovation ecosystem is building the deep, self-sustaining capability needed to achieve Viksit Bharat 2047– a developed, technology-leading nation by the centenary of independence. The evidence suggests that ambition and architecture are still running at different speeds.
The Jugaad Trap
For decades, India celebrated jugaad – frugal, improvised, workaround innovation – as a competitive virtue. In conditions of resource scarcity, it was. But the demands of the fourth industrial revolution are different. Competing in semiconductors, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, hypersonic systems, and biotechnology requires not improvisation but precision: sustained investment, institutional depth, long-cycle research, and an ecosystem that converts scientific output into patented, scalable, globally competitive products.
The R&D Funding Gap: The Number That Defines Everything
No single statistic captures India’s innovation challenge more starkly than its R&D investment. India invests less than 0.65 per cent of its GDP in R&D. South Korea spends more than 4.5 per cent, Israel 5.4 per cent, the United States 2.8 per cent, and China 2.4 per cent. India’s gross R&D expenditure is lower than the global average of 1.79 per cent, and two-thirds of that expenditure comes from the government rather than the private sector – the reverse of the pattern seen in leading innovative economies.
This is not merely an economic abstraction. Underinvestment limits the scaling of research at IITs, IISc, and CSIR laboratories, discourages the creation of valuable industries like biotechnology, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence, and continues the dependency on foreign technologies.
India’s renewable energy sector remains heavily reliant on imported solar modules; its high-tech manufacturing is still tethered to outsourced automation platforms. Experts have called for India to spend at least one per cent, and ideally three per cent, of GDP every year until 2047 on R&D for science to have meaningful developmental impact.
The Union Budget 2025-26 announced a new Research, Development and Innovation Fund worth ₹1 lakh crore over six years, with ₹20,000 crore allocated for FY26. This is encouraging – but the history of India’s science funding carries a sobering footnote: in 2022-23, the Department of Biotechnology used only 72 per cent of its allocated budget on centrally sponsored schemes, while the Department of Science and Technology used only 61 per cent. Announcing funds is not the same as deploying them with discipline. Patient capital – long-cycle, outcome-oriented R&D funding that does not demand quarterly returns – remains structurally rare in the Indian system.
The Semiconductor Warning: What Happens Without Strategic Clarity
The semiconductor mission offers the clearest case study in the consequences of ambition without precision. India’s Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Security flagged significant bottlenecks in the implementation of semiconductor schemes, including delays in project approvals, coordination issues across ministries, and gaps in infrastructure readiness. ISM 1.0, approved in December 2021 with an incentive framework of approximately ₹76,000 crore, succeeded in attracting investment announcements – but as of late 2025, projects had not yet translated into major output, and analysts said India’s position would be determined less by headline investment and more by whether the programme could address the gaps that faffing alone cannot solve.
Semiconductor fabrication consumes tens of megawatts of electricity and millions of litres of ultra-pure water daily, it further requires sophisticated logistics and clean-room standards that few Indian cities currently offer, and demands a financing model that de-risks private capital through shared infrastructure, predictable policies, and coordinated implementation. India’s semiconductor strategy has been described by analysts as scattered and diffused – no single nation can build a complete supply chain in the short term, and India’s policy needs to focus on areas of greatest leverage rather than trying to compress decades of semiconductor ecosystem-building into a single policy cycle.
ISM 2.0, launched in 2026, has begun to course-correct – shifting focus from fab subsidies toward the full ecosystem of equipment, materials, Indian IP, supply chains, and workforce training. But the lesson from ISM 1.0 is one that every subsequent mission must internalise: half-baked plans in capital-intensive, long-gestation technology sectors do not merely waste money – they waste the irreplaceable window of geopolitical opportunity that India currently occupies.
Defence Startups: The Model Worth Scaling
If the semiconductor experience shows what incomplete strategy looks like, the iDEX (Innovations for Defence Excellence) ecosystem shows what disciplined innovation support can achieve. Over 2,000 defence and 300 space startups are now driving deep-tech innovation in India. In emerging technologies like AI, quantum computing, and drones, Indian startups are producing globally competitive solutions – QNu Labs achieved record distances in Quantum Key Distribution, outperforming global competitors. PSUs, once viewed as mere assembly units, filed over 2,000 patents. Mazagon Docks engineers designed India’s first midget submarine prototype.
The iDEX programme provides non-dilutive grants of up to ₹10 crore to defence technology startups for research, development, and prototype creation – the largest government startup grants available in India. The ADITI scheme, complementing iDEX, targets the development of thirty deep-tech critical and strategic technologies by 2026, with export potential built in from the design stage. Defence exports have grown from ₹14 billion in 2016-17 to ₹250 billion – a fifteen-fold increase – and for the first time India is not merely a defence importer but also a meaningful exporter.
The iDEX model works because it combines clear problem-statement framing, non-dilutive capital, fast procurement pathways, and a defined end-customer in the armed forces. That model – problem-led, outcome-linked, adequately funded – is precisely what India’s broader innovation architecture needs to replicate across semiconductors, clean energy, biotech, and deep-tech manufacturing.
Toward Precision Innovation: What Vision 2047 Actually Requires
India’s path from a promising innovation performer to a genuine technology leader by 2047 runs through four non-negotiable transformations. First, R&D investment must rise decisively – the ₹1 lakh crore RDI Fund is a start, but it must be deployed, not just announced, and private sector R&D contribution must be structurally incentivised to reach the 65-70 per cent share seen in leading economies. Second, patient capital must become a system feature rather than an exception – long-gestation deep-tech investments need financing structures that tolerate decade-long payback horizons, something India’s predominantly short-cycle venture ecosystem is not currently built to provide.
Third, strategic clarity must precede investment in every capital-intensive technology domain – the semiconductor lesson must not be repeated in quantum computing, advanced materials, or space manufacturing. Fourth, the innovation-to-procurement pipeline for defence startups must be widened, with faster absorption of iDEX and ADITI solutions into actual military inventory and a deliberate push to convert dual-use technologies into global export products.
India has built its innovation strengths on knowledge outputs and market sophistication. The weaknesses – in business sophistication, infrastructure, and institutions – are exactly the areas that separate a high-performing emerging economy from a technology leader. Closing those gaps is the work of the next two decades.
India has the talent, the diaspora, the demographic dividend, and now the political will. What it still needs is the strategic patience to build innovation institutions that outlast election cycles, fund science that will not show results for a decade, and resist the temptation to announce a mission without first assembling the conditions for its success. That discipline – more than any ranking – will determine whether Viksit Bharat 2047 is a vision realised or a vision deferred.
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