View: Where are India Inc.’s moonshots? Spending on innovations needs a boost
The numbers tell the story. Just before the pandemic, India was spending a paltry 1.2 trillion rupees ($15 billion) on research and development. Since at least 1995, R&D expenditure has remained stuck at around 0.7% of gross domestic product, with less than two-fifths of it coming from the private sector.
Most of that, too, is about tinkering with existing technologies, especially in pharmaceuticals, computing and telecom, rather than original intellectual property. China’s 25:1 lead over India in patent applications shows the gap quite clearly.
The 12-fold jump in India’s national income in dollar terms over the past three decades has been largely a product of labor-cost advantage over the West and a growing role for finance in the domestic economy. While corporate bosses in Mumbai and New Delhi like nothing better than to talk about how the 21st century will belong to India, they don’t exactly care to expound on their own plans to make it happen.
That’s because they don’t have one.
Not that it should ever be contemplated, but imagine a scenario where the Indian Space Research Organisation is privatized. The government agency earns hundreds of million dollars by launching satellites for global clients. Put a capability like that under a computer-software czar in Bengaluru, and you’ll get a flourishing outsourced service.
But that’s all you will get.
“Technology can and must be the great amplifier of our human potential, our humanity,” Vishal Sikka, the chief executive of Infosys Ltd., wrote in the software exporter’s 2015-16 annual report. The former SAP AG computer scientist, a co-author of a natural-language-processing patent, was talking about a small donation to a nonprofit lab in San Francisco. By the time OpenAI
