View: Get a PPPiece of innovation action
Vikram lander's soft landing near the lunar south pole last year, India became a league of its own. And, yet, it ranks 40th on the Global Innovation Index. Isro-like successes remain isolated. R&D expenditures in India have stagnated at about 0.6% of GDP.
While there is a need to increase public sector spending on R&D, it is often argued that private sector should step up its investments. Paradoxically, while MNCs are increasingly leveraging India as their innovation hub, the broader innovation ecosystem's output leaves much to be desired, and local enterprises lament limited availability of well-trained R&D professionals.
There is limited clarity on the modalities of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation that came into effect on Monday, and the ₹1 lakh crore corpus for research and innovation announced in the interim budget. While these are welcome experiments in innovation financing, publicly supported industry consortia remain largely underutilised.
Arguably, strategic PPPs can be a useful way to attract private investments as well as leapfrog local capacity to innovate. The efficacy of such partnerships in India would depend on the clarity of strategic intent and presence of certain critical elements in the financing, operational, governance and evaluation structures of such arrangements.
PPPs in R&D are formal relationships between public and private actors, where both sides participate in the decision-making process, and co-invest scarce resources like money, personnel, infrastructure and knowledge,
