For three months this spring, the most consequential number in the Indian economy was the distance between a tanker and the Strait of Hormuz. When the strait closed in March, a country that imports the overwhelming share of the oil it uses found its lifeline pinched at a single point and rerouted at a cost to longer voyages for Russian crude. The lesson was salutary, but incomplete. In the end, oil can be rerouted. A nation that is aspiring to be self-reliant in critical technologies enjoys no such latitude.
The deeper lesson is not that supply chains are fragile, but that they have become instruments of policy — an export licence a lever, a chokepoint a weapon, a technology freely traded one year, an object of denial the next. China spends 2.43 per cent of its output on research and development, three-quarters of it financed by its own companies, with one ambition: To end its dependence on technologies others control and deepen the world’s dependence on those it controls.
India knows where it stands, because it has taken its own measure without flinching. As of 2023, it spends 0.64 per cent of GDP on research and development — against a global average more than twice that — and barely two-fifths of even that is financed by private enterprise, whereas in China, Korea and America the share is three-quarters or more. However, the state has, for the first time, put real weight behind the proposition.
The Anusandhan National Research Foundation, notified in 2024 — a statutory body chaired by the Prime Minister, convening academia, industry, start-ups, philanthropy and the diaspora — exists to change the arithmetic of risk. Its Research, Development and Innovation Fund commits Rs 1 lakh crore over six years to the private sector alone, a fund of funds supplying patient capital built to outlast the quarterly cycle; its ANRF Core adds Rs 50,000 crore over five years for underlying science. The design is catalytic: For every rupee companies invest in pre-commercial research in partnership with the foundation, they are likely to commit five to 10 of their own to commercialise and scale up these research outputs. All-of-government and all-of-society collaboration is a means to higher productivity and impact for all parties. And it goes beyond the cheque, aligning government procurement and regulation with the landscape it is building.
A firm may enter as a limited partner alongside the foundation’s anchor capital in a second-level fund manager; participate directly as an eligible technology entity; or do so through a joint venture with start-ups and the global capability centres (GCCs) already here. On the science side, it may partner on a national mission, set a pre-competitive challenge for the foundation to co-fund, route its corporate social responsibility (CSR) through the ANRF Innovation Fund, or share the cost of a single project before committing further. So many doors exist for one reason: The threshold should never be what keeps a willing firm outside.
But the argument must move on from what is offered to what is required, for a catalyst is not a substitute, or a crutch. The foundation can lower the risk of the climb; it cannot make it. Three acts remain the industry’s own. The first is to mobilise one’s own capital behind the public catalyst. The second is to choose, with strategic seriousness, the arenas that matter — the technologies in which dependence is most dangerous and capability most valuable — over the incremental gains a captive market rewards. The third, least glamorous and most important, is institutional: To build inside the firm the machinery long-horizon goals demand — dedicated research units, corporate venture arms, planning functions insulated from the tyranny of the next quarter. India can be the world’s research and development partner. All of us have to build it together: The foundation’s logic is partnership with academia and deep-technology start-ups that outpace incumbents. Building it yields a dividend, no income statement records: Employment, for the doctoral talent India trains at cost and too readily watches depart, with the world-class research culture and context.
Indian industry can rise to such a challenge and history provides the evidence. When India accepted the World Trade Organisation’s intellectual property regime in the mid-1990s, agreeing to honour product patents in pharmaceuticals, the expectation was that the domestic drug industry, built on reverse-engineering molecules others had discovered, would be overrun by the very multinationals whose patents it had worked around. That is not what happened. Indian firms chose to build rather than retreat: They mastered process chemistry and the world’s strictest regulatory requirements, and made themselves the pharmacy for much of the world. The inflection now before Indian enterprise is broader; its logic is identical.
The climb, moreover, can be swifter than it was for those who went before. India faces the task with the pieces in place at once — a demographic dividend available now, not forever; unmatched digital public infrastructure; funds and architecture now in place; and a global moment that rewards any economy offering an alternative to a single dominant supplier. These are the conditions under which a country does not merely catch up but leaps — from the consumer of intellectual property it has too long been, to the generator its aspirations demand. But the window is the one thing the state cannot hold open alone. Hormuz showed what it costs to depend on others for what one needs; the technological independence that will enhance resilience and, eventually, build indispensability can be achieved only by building capabilities from the ground up. The state has walked the first stretch of that road; the laboratories are ready; the capital is available, and industry’s commitment will complete the compact.
The writers are respectively the CEO of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation and the Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India. Views are personal
Indian industry can rise to such a challenge and history provides the evidence. 
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