India’s flagship deep-tech financing scheme faces initial setbacks as the Technology Development Board suspends applications due to lack of additional funds, threatening the acceleration of innovation in frontier industries like quantum computing, space, and robotics.
India’s flagship deep-tech financing programme has run into an early bottleneck, with the Technology Development Board suspending fresh applications for the Research, Development and Innovation Fund after exhausting the money it had received for the first phase. The pause matters because the scheme was designed to help private companies push risky, early-stage work in fields such as quantum computing, space, robotics and artificial intelligence, where patient capital is often hard to find.
According to The Indian Express, the board quietly posted a notice saying invitations would close this month for administrative reasons, but multiple sources said the real problem was simpler: the agency had not been given additional funds to continue after the first round of lending. The Department of Science and Technology has been allocated Rs 23,000 crore for the programme across two Budgets, but the board received only Rs 2,000 crore earlier this year, which was already used up in April when 22 companies were offered soft loans worth Rs 2,192 crore.
The stop-start rollout comes despite an ambitious design. Government documents on the Technology Development Board’s website say the RDI Fund was approved by the Union Cabinet on 1 July 2025 and carries a total outlay of Rs 1 lakh crore over six years, including Rs 20,000 crore in 2025-26. The scheme is meant to provide long-term, low-cost loans covering up to half of a project’s cost, with companies expected to raise the rest from non-government sources. The board and Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council were named as second-level fund managers, with room for more private-sector intermediaries to join later.
Progress has been slower than that framework suggested. The Indian Express reported that more than 300 companies have applied, about 100 have been appraised and 35 have been chosen so far, including 22 in the first round and 13 in a second round that was later put on hold before letters of intent could be issued. Business Standard previously reported that the first tranche included firms such as Agnikul Cosmos, GalaxEye, ideaForge and Ather Energy, underscoring the programme’s focus on frontier technologies and advanced manufacturing.
The delays also highlight a second constraint: the wider network of fund managers the government had expected to rely on has not yet fully come on stream. The newspaper said the process for appointing additional second-level fund managers was delayed, while BIRAC has been waiting for clarity on tax treatment before beginning its own disbursements. For now, that leaves the country’s most prominent public deep-tech funding effort partly launched but short of the capital and administrative machinery needed to deliver at the scale originally promised.
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