Buried in a slim government publication released last month is a number that deserves more attention than it has received. In 2023/24, private industry accounted for 45.2 per cent of India’s gross expenditure on research and development. Three years earlier, it was 32.2 per cent. Over the same period, the government’s share fell from 54.5 per cent to 48.2 per cent, below half for the first time in the history of the measurement. For a country whose research effort has been carried on the state’s shoulders since Independence, through the atomic energy establishment, the space programme, the defence laboratories and the agricultural research system, this is not a rounding error.

It is a change in who pays for Indian science. The aggregate has moved with it. National R&D spending has more than tripled in a decade, from Rs 79,356 crore in 2013/14 to Rs 2.45 lakh crore in 2023/24, and is projected to reach Rs 3.13 lakh crore in the current year. As a share of GDP, R&D intensity has climbed from 0.64 per cent in 2020/21 to 0.84 per cent, an all-time high, with 0.90 per cent projected for 2025/26. In purchasing power terms, India’s research spending has roughly doubled in three years, to about $120 billion. The output figures point the same way.

India’s scientific publications grew from 78,135 in 2012 to 2,07,390 in 2022, a compound rate of 10.25 per cent against a world average of 4.74 per cent, placing the country third globally behind China and the United States. Of the 1,10,375 patent applications filed in India in 2024/25, 62 per cent came from Indian residents. The resident share of patents actually granted has risen from 15 per cent in 2013/14 to 32 per cent. There are now 5.07 lakh full time equivalent researchers in the country, 354 per million people, up from 262 three years ago, and 1.47 lakh of them, 29 per cent, are women, against 18.6 per cent in 2020/21.

This is a real ascent, and it should be said plainly before the qualifications begin. Now the qualifications. At 0.84 per cent of GDP, India still spends less than a third of what Korea, Israel or the United States commit, and roughly a third of China’s 2.58 per cent. Even the projected 0.90 per cent leaves us below Brazil. The 2 per cent mark, which is the floor for countries that intend to compete at the technological frontier, is not reachable by........

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