Opinion On the eve of union budget, India’s next growth question must revolve around ownership, not merely service
In a world shaped by geopolitical uncertainty, climate transition, and health shocks, economic strength is increasingly being defined by the ability to build, adapt, and manufacture critical products domestically, not merely adopt them efficiently
India’s innovation ecosystem is skewed toward either discovery or deployment, with too little attention paid to what lies in between India’s rise as a global service powerhouse remains one of its most successful economic transformations. Software exports, IT-enabled services, and global capability centres delivered jobs, foreign exchange, and international credibility at scale. This model powered growth for three decades and integrated India deeply into the global economy. But the question India now faces is not whether services worked, but whether they are enough for what comes next.
A service-led economy scales people. A product-led economy scales ideas. Services grow by deploying skilled labour, while products embed knowledge into platforms, processes, and manufacturing systems that can scale independently of headcount. As automation and AI tools begin to compress traditional service margins, the limits of labour-based growth are becoming increasingly visible. More importantly, services tend to sit downstream in global value chains, responding to demand created elsewhere. Product-owning nations shape markets, set standards, and capture long-term value. India’s challenge, therefore, is not one of competence, but of position.
Biomanufacturing offers a window into this structural gap. India is globally respected for pharmaceutical manufacturing and affordable generics. Yet, in newer domains such as advanced biologics, engineered enzymes, sustainable chemicals, microbial manufacturing platforms, and cell-based therapies, product ownership and platform control often lie outside the country. This is not due to weak science. India has demonstrated that it can develop frontier technologies end-to-end. The development of NexCAR19, India’s first indigenously developed CAR-T cell therapy, showed that advanced biomedical innovation, clinical translation, and regulatory clearance are possible within the country. What made it notable was the rare alignment of research capability, manufacturing intent, regulatory engagement, and problem-driven demand.
Such examples, however, remain exceptions. In most cases, laboratory breakthroughs struggle to move beyond proof-of-concept, unable to access the scale-up infrastructure, risk capital, and institutional support required to become scalable, domestically owned products. This pattern is not confined to biotechnology. In climate and energy, India is rapidly deploying solutions, from biofuels to green hydrogen and low-carbon manufacturing. Yet, many enabling technologies, including electrolysers, catalysts, advanced materials, and bioprocessing systems, are imported or licensed. In healthcare, India manufactures at scale but continues to depend heavily on external innovation pipelines for advanced diagnostics and platform therapies. India executes well. But execution alone does not confer control.
It is against this backdrop that recent global economic conversations have begun to shift. At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, the emphasis was no longer on cost optimisation and frictionless outsourcing, but on resilience, re-industrialisation, supply-chain security, and strategic technologies. In a world shaped by geopolitical uncertainty, climate transition, and health shocks, economic strength is increasingly being defined by the ability to build, adapt, and manufacture critical products domestically, not merely adopt them efficiently.
Yet, India’s innovation ecosystem is skewed toward either discovery or deployment, with too little attention paid to what lies in between. Universities are rewarded for publications rather than prototypes. Public funding often ends at proof-of-concept. Scale-up infrastructure, including pilot plants, testbeds, and demonstration facilities, is sparse and fragmented. Regulatory pathways are clearer for imports than for first-of-kind domestic technologies. Public procurement continues to prioritise lowest cost over long-term capability building.
The result is a persistent missing middle, the space where promising technologies repeatedly fail to survive the transition from laboratory success to industrial relevance. This is the space that product nations invest in most deliberately. That investment is rarely glamorous. It involves shared infrastructure, regulatory learning, patient capital, and public demand that tolerates early imperfection in exchange for future capability. Moving from a service nation to a product nation does not mean abandoning services. It means ensuring services become a foundation for deeper value creation.
India’s service economy delivered scale, speed, and international credibility. But in a world where power increasingly flows from product ownership rather than execution alone, the next phase of India’s growth will depend on whether its service strength is leveraged to design, build, and own technologies that matter. Services brought India credibility. Products will determine its power.
The writer is chief scientist, CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory, Pune. Views are personal
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