A new NITI Aayog report highlights the disconnect between India’s improving global innovation index position and its weak research ecosystem, calling for increased funding, institutional reform, and stronger industry-academia links to foster sustainable growth.
India’s innovation story has improved, but a new assessment from NITI Aayog argues that the country is still failing to turn that progress into a strong research base, particularly in state universities. The report, released on 9 April 2026 after consultations with more than 110 universities across the states and union territories, says India’s Global Innovation Index ranking rose from 52nd in 2019 to 40th in 2023, yet the underlying research ecosystem remains uneven and underpowered. It points to a wide gap between ambition and capacity, with state institutions often carrying heavy teaching loads, limited research time and weaker access to funding than their counterparts in better-resourced systems. According to the World Intellectual Property Organisation, the Global Innovation Index is designed to measure innovation performance across a broad set of inputs, underlining that rankings alone do not capture whether a country has the institutional depth to sustain research growth.
A central concern in the report is money. India’s gross expenditure on research and development remains around 0.7% of GDP, far below the 2% target in the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy 2013 and well under the levels seen in Germany and Japan. The British government’s research summary says Japan’s total R&D spending reached about 3.6% of GDP in 2021, while Germany has long aimed for 3.5%, illustrating the distance India must cover if it wants a more research-intensive economy. The report also says private industry still contributes too little to Indian research, leaving the government to shoulder most of the burden. By contrast, in mature innovation systems, business typically drives the bulk of research spending.
The NITI Aayog review also finds that the problem is not just the volume of proposals, but what happens after submission. It says most surveyed universities now have intellectual property cells, yet acceptance rates for research proposals, rather than proposal counts alone, are the real bottleneck. The report links research strength to the number of universities and registered R&D units in a state, suggesting that institutional density matters as much as individual talent. It also flags weak outreach to students, thin postgraduate pipelines, slow approval chains, late disbursal of funds and limited interdisciplinary work as recurring obstacles. In some cases, the report says, state funding does not keep pace as more proposals are approved, pointing to patchy support rather than a stable research strategy.
To close those gaps, the report calls for research and development cells in every university, better laboratories and instruments, stronger incentives for faculty and students, and more support for intellectual property creation and technology transfer. It also urges state governments to give universities greater autonomy, back promising projects more consistently and make hiring and fellowship support more flexible. At the Centre, the report recommends faster implementation of the National Education Policy 2020, simpler rules for setting up universities, easier norms for contract teachers and relief from tax burdens on state universities. It argues that India will need deeper links between academia and industry, along the lines of Germany’s applied-research model or Japan’s collaborative innovation networks, if it is to become a serious global research hub.
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