Official figures show India’s R&D spending and patent filings accelerating sharply, but changes to the survey method and gaps with other datasets make the apparent breakthrough difficult to assess.
India’s official science and technology numbers are presenting a far brighter picture than many observers expected, but the scale of the improvement has prompted as much scepticism as celebration. In its latest biennial review, the Department of Science and Technology says gross expenditure on research and development rose sharply in the post-Covid years, reversing a long decline in R&D intensity and lifting India to levels not seen before. The report also points to a surge in patenting, suggesting that the country’s innovation system has entered a stronger phase. Yet the same document raises an awkward question: how much of this apparent breakthrough reflects real change, and how much stems from a new survey method that makes direct comparison with earlier data difficult?
According to the department’s Research and Development Statistics 2025-26, the latest figures are based on a new National Science and Technology Survey carried out in 2024-25, after a long gap since the previous round. The report says the survey covered around 8,000 entities involved in R&D, while the 2018-19 exercise captured about 5,000 organisations. Biswajit Dhar argues that the two exercises are not fully comparable, in part because the newer survey leaves a much larger share of units uncategorised. On his reading, the unexplained categories account for roughly 65 per cent of the latest survey, compared with about 48 per cent in the earlier round. He says this gap makes it difficult to know whether the reported leap in spending reflects a genuine surge or a statistical reclassification.
The headline number is striking either way. The report says India’s gross expenditure on research and development reached ₹2.45 lakh crore in 2023-24, up from ₹1.95 lakh crore in 2021-22, with R&D intensity rising from 0.64 per cent of gross domestic product in 2020-21 to 0.84 per cent in 2023-24. The department’s projections suggest the ratio could climb further in the following two years. Dhar notes that this would mark a dramatic reversal after more than a decade of decline, during which India’s R&D effort fell from 0.84 per cent of GDP in 2008-09 to 0.64 per cent in 2020-21. He questions whether such a turnaround can be explained so quickly, especially since the report does not set out the basis for its forward-looking estimates.
A major part of the increase appears to come from private business, which the department now portrays as the dominant force in R&D spending. The report says private entities, including industry, scientific and industrial research organisations and private higher education institutions, have taken a much larger share of total expenditure than before. Industry alone spent about ₹1.1 lakh crore on R&D in 2023-24, up from roughly ₹77,000 crore in 2021-22, and more than 87 per cent of private-sector R&D spending came from corporate entities. Dhar says the concentration is unusually high, with the top 10 spenders accounting for 93 per cent of the total in the industrial category. He also points to a mismatch between the report’s claims and other datasets, including CMIE’s Prowess database, which he says records far lower spending by large automotive and pharmaceutical companies than the official survey does.
The patent figures tell a similar story of rapid expansion, but not necessarily of unambiguous progress. Business Standard reported in April that India recorded 143,729 patent application filings in 2025-26, a 30.2 per cent rise, with more than 69 per cent filed domestically. The government has framed that growth as evidence of a stronger intellectual property ecosystem, particularly for start-ups, MSMEs and educational institutions. But Dhar cautions that raw patent counts can overstate the strength of an innovation system, especially when a large share of grants goes to non-residents. He argues that India still relies heavily on imported know-how and that foreign exchange payments for intellectual property have climbed steeply over the past decade. In that light, the statistical upswing may be real, but it does not yet prove that India has shed its technological dependence.
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