India’s next scientific leap will depend more on long-term private and philanthropic investment than on public slogans, as the country lags behind global R&D spenders and seeks to boost innovation in critical fields.
India’s next scientific leap will depend less on public slogans than on who is willing to fund ideas long before they become profitable. That is the central argument of the Business Standard column, and it lands at a moment when India’s research system still relies too heavily on the state while private enterprise remains a comparatively small source of support.
The scale of the gap is stark. The Economic Survey 2025-26, as reported by Business Today, says India’s gross expenditure on research and development is 0.64% of GDP, far below China’s 2.43%, the US’s 3.48% and South Korea’s 4.91%. It also says business accounts for only 41% of India’s R&D spending, versus 77% in China, 75% in the US and 79% in South Korea. In that context, the column argues, philanthropic capital is uniquely useful because it can back work that governments, with election cycles to mind, and companies, with quarterly earnings to protect, often cannot wait decades to see through.
That point becomes more pressing when set against the structure of India’s current R&D push. Business Standard reported in January that Central Public Sector Enterprises increased R&D spending by 25.6% in 2024-25 to ₹9,691 crore, with defence taking the largest share, followed by petroleum and heavy engineering. Even so, the column suggests that public-sector spending, while useful, cannot by itself fill the long-horizon funding gap that basic research, early-stage science and high-risk experimentation require.
The piece points to Indian examples that already show what patient money can do. Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and Kris Gopalakrishnan have backed brain research at major institutions such as the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, the National Centre for Biological Sciences and the Indian Institute of Science. The column also recalls how the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research began with philanthropic backing and went on to become central to India’s atomic-energy capability. Abroad, it notes, the Wellcome Trust helped finance the Human Genome Project and the Gates Foundation supported the development of MenAfriVac, a low-cost meningitis vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India.
The new policy backdrop makes the case more urgent. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation, created under the ANRF Act 2023, is meant to mobilise around ₹36,000 crore of its ₹50,000 crore corpus from outside government. Business Standard says India now publishes the world’s third-largest volume of scientific papers, which gives philanthropies a wider base of talent to support. The column’s broader argument is that the next phase of growth in fields such as artificial intelligence, genomics and quantum computing will be shaped not just by public policy or private markets, but by whether India’s wealth creators are prepared to fund science for the nation the way earlier generations funded science for sovereignty.
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