India will have to innovate its way to developed country status
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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. 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.
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