India’s ₹1 lakh crore RDI fund, launched to boost high-tech industries, is under investigation for potential conflicts of interest after revealing that a significant portion of initial funding recipients have links to decision-makers, raising questions about the integrity of the scheme’s allocation process.
India’s new Research, Development and Innovation scheme was designed to push more private money into areas where the country has long struggled to compete, from robotics and space systems to biotechnology and clean energy. According to a government press release, the programme was approved on July 1, 2025, with a corpus of ₹1 lakh crore over six years, and it is meant to back high-risk, high-impact work through long-term financing rather than traditional grants.
The Indian Express investigation examined how that money was being allocated after Parliament raised questions about the safeguards around the fund. By the time of the newspaper’s reporting, the scheme had already made its first disbursements: The Technology Development Board said it had received 124 proposals by April 30 and then signed its first funding agreements in May with five deep-tech firms working in space, robotics, batteries, drones and advanced healthcare.
What the investigation found was that the first round of lending, worth ₹2,192 crore across 22 companies, was not as detached from the private sector as the government’s initial explanation suggested. The newspaper reported that 15 of those firms had links to seven members of the panel that decided where the money went, accounting for more than ₹1,377 crore, or about 62% of the total.
The government said the selections were made purely on merit and that any member with a conflict had been kept out of the evaluation and approval process. In its response to Parliament and in a later statement, officials said disclosure and recusal rules were built into the system, while the Department of Science and Technology has argued that the scheme needs patient capital if India is to build a stronger deep-tech ecosystem.
One of the panellists at the centre of the scrutiny, Gopal Srinivasan of TVS Capital, told The Indian Express that the debate was appropriate and belonged in the public domain. He said the aim of the fund was to provide long-term risk capital for promising technologies and added that the initiative itself had been shaped in part by private-sector calls to fill financing gaps.
That wider ambition helps explain why the issue matters beyond a single round of funding. The government has described the RDI scheme as a six-year effort to support strategic sectors including quantum computing, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and digital technologies, and other reports have said more than 100 venture capital firms have applied to participate. But the first tranche has also exposed the central tension in the model: the state is trying to harness market expertise while insisting that the people judging the investments are not unduly connected to the companies seeking them.
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