On its first day, the committee that would decide where India’s new deep-tech fund put its money was handed a hard brief: There is very little deep tech in this country. Here is two thousand crore. Go and find it.
So they did. They went to the ventures they knew — the ones they had watched, mentored, argued with, and in some cases carried through the years when no one else would write a cheque. They backed the companies whose science had already been proven. And last week, this paper published a so-called investigative report that they had done something troubling: 62 per cent of the first round had gone to firms in which panel members held an interest.
I read the story with sadness, not anger — and let me own my position at once. I serve in this government, so weigh what follows with whatever discount you think that deserves; the argument does not need my office to stand. The sadness, in any case, is not about a single report, a single journalist, or a single newspaper. It is about a habit of mind that keeps us scoring self-goals while the world races ahead.
The question of conflict of interest is a fair one. Public money deserves scrutiny, and it is good that this is being discussed openly. Gopal Srinivasan of the panel said exactly that when the paper reached him. Accountability is the condition of trust.
What is in dispute is the frame. And the frame rests on a fact the investigation never grasped: How the one lakh crore is actually spent.
The money does not go out in a single round through one committee. It is expected to be disbursed over five years through several fund managers, of whom only two have been appointed so far. More are to come. The Technology Development Board’s first cohort is a sliver of the whole, and it was appraised on a first-come, first-served basis. The companies that applied earliest were the ones that heard about the fund earliest — and the ones that heard earliest were, unsurprisingly, close to the ecosystem. That is why the first batch looks the way it does. The Board has already said that in the second cohort, one of 13 firms has a panel link. Not 62 per cent. The number the headline was built on was always going to fall because it was an artefact of sequence, not a pattern of favour.
Now to the harder charge, and the fairer one: A small circle of experts clearing one another’s ventures, recusing one at a time, does not pass the smell test. It deserves an answer.
Here is the answer. If you want to find validated deep-tech ventures quickly, you ask the handful of Indians who actually know the field. Anyone in India who knows this field has touched these companies — mentored them, funded a founder, sat on a board. It is the reason they were chosen. The money is the tip of the iceberg of what this group has given to Indian deep tech.
So the design does not pretend to eliminate the overlap. It manages it. Firms that a member founded, owns, or runs cannot even apply, however good they are. A stake of more than 10 per cent automatically disqualifies a firm. Members must disclose not only their own interests but their interests in a rival — a standard stricter than most private boards keep. Selection needs a super-majority, so two or three doubts sink a proposal. The government’s exposure is capped at half the project cost. The whole thing passes a second time through a board of secretaries. Recusals are declared in advance and recorded. This is not the absence of guardrails. There are more of them than most of our institutions bother with.
Which brings me to the test that matters, and that the story never applied. The proof of a fund is in its outcomes. Were undeserving ventures funded? Were deserving ones turned away? That is the audit worth doing. Judge the decision on what was knowable then, not on what hindsight reveals now. We rightly tell our bureaucracy to pursue outcomes rather than hide behind process. It is a strange day when the press asks it to do the opposite. Here is the bitter part: We who count the “conflict of interest” today are the same who will, a decade from now, write a harsh critique lampooning the government for letting India fall behind in the very technologies this fund was built to seed.
The likely effect of a “62 per cent” headline is not cleaner governance. It is a chill. The founders who were, for the first time, animated by the sense that the system had faith in them will read it and grow wary. Technologists of global standing who might have joined the next committee will think twice about lending their names to a body that is treated as a cartel. A watchdog is meant to prevent harm. Here it risks producing the very harm it exists to guard against.
None of this asks the press to fall silent. It asks the opposite. There was a genuinely important story, and the paper is well placed to tell it. Where does follow-on capital come from once these ventures outgrow their first loan? How do we build funds large enough to carry them? Should we monetise idle public assets to seed a sovereign fund for this? Those questions decide whether India’s deep-tech ambition survives its infancy. They are harder to write than a conflict-of-interest headline. They are also worth incomparably more.
There was an easy path here and a hard one. The easy path was a tidy number, a whiff of impropriety, a takedown that writes itself. The hard path was slower — to sit with the committee, understand how it works, weigh the trade-off it was asked to make, and then decide whether the deviation, if any, was gross, reasonable, or none at all. Too often, we take the easy path and call it diligence.
This is the price of a democracy. Authoritarian systems are spared these noises; they are also spared the correction that noise can bring. But a democracy has to learn the difference between holding power to account and reaching reflexively for suspicion. Get that wrong often enough, and the result is not vigilance. It is paralysis dressed as virtue.
I keep returning to a plain fear. The world is about to change in ways we can scarcely picture. We, in India, have a choice. The political class, the bureaucracy, the watchdogs and the media, all of us can spend the decade pulling the rug from under one another’s feet and keep India where it is while everyone else moves. Or, we understand the strategic imperatives, re-examine our trade-offs, our red lines and ways of working. The choice is ours to make and the consequences ours to bear
The writer is the 18th Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India. Views are personal
The question of conflict of interest is a fair one. Public money deserves scrutiny, and it is good that this is being discussed openly. (Illustration: C R Sasikumar) 
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