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........

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