India launches a ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation fund to accelerate the transformation of scientific research into commercially viable technologies, aiming to emulate the US model and bolster its deep-tech ecosystem.
India’s ambition to build a self-reliant deep-tech base rests on a simple but difficult task: turning scientific research into products, companies and strategic capability. The debate has sharpened as the United States and China continue to fuse universities, laboratories, venture money, manufacturing and markets into powerful innovation systems. In India, by contrast, research has often remained concentrated in public institutions, while private investment has lagged and the leap from laboratory to commercial use has remained too wide. That is the gap the government’s new ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation fund is meant to narrow.
The scheme sits within the Anusandhan National Research Foundation, whose provisions came into force in February 2024, after the ANRF Act 2023 created an apex body to guide research and innovation across universities, colleges, laboratories and other institutions. According to the government’s RDI fund portal, the initiative was launched on 3 November 2025 and is designed to support high-impact projects at Technology Readiness Level 4 and above, where ideas move beyond basic research towards prototypes, testing and validation. The fund is structured to work through a special purpose pool under ANRF and second-level fund managers, including financial institutions and research-focused intermediaries, so that capital can be deployed with more technical judgement and closer market alignment.
The logic behind the scheme is to bring India closer to the kind of innovation pipeline seen in the US. Kannan K’s analysis in The Indian Express points to two pillars of that model: the Bayh-Dole Act, which gave universities and inventors greater control over intellectual property from publicly funded research, and DARPA-style financing, which helps absorb the early risk of breakthrough technologies. Together, those mechanisms have allowed American research institutions to license patents, support start-ups and attract venture capital once commercial prospects become clearer. India’s challenge is that its system still tends to separate public science from private capital, leaving many promising technologies stranded between discovery and deployment.
Yet the success of the RDI fund will depend less on the size of the corpus than on execution. The scheme is aimed at strategic areas such as artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, robotics, clean energy, biotechnology and the digital economy, but deep-tech finance is inherently uncertain and slow. That means India will need appraisal systems capable of judging pre-revenue technologies without forcing them into the same mould as routine lending. It will also need safeguards that encourage honest risk-taking, faster technical assessment and wider access for start-ups, universities and newer research clusters beyond the largest industrial groups. If that balance can be achieved, the ANRF framework could become more than a funding vehicle: it could become the institutional bridge between Indian science and globally competitive technology.
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