Private industry increases national funding for quantum research

The Story in Brief

The Department of Science and Technology’s latest figures show that in 2023-24 private industry accounted for 51.8% of national research spending, the first time it has overtaken all tiers of government combined. Industry now employs more core researchers than government institutions. Transport firms are the largest corporate investors, followed by pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and information technology. Private R&D rose sharply after 2020: spending nearly doubled from ₹46,388 crore in 2020-21 to ₹82,975 crore in 2021-22, while total R&D climbed from ₹1.27 lakh crore to ₹1.95 lakh crore in a single year. R&D spending in transport has roughly tripled and now leads alongside biotechnology and IT among research-intensive industries.

Officials link part of the rise to a post-pandemic realisation of research’s importance, but analysts note that mandatory sustainability disclosures for large listed firms and tighter RBI reporting norms coincided with the surge, bringing spending in foreign subsidiaries and captive centres into official counts. New capital is also going into AI, chip design and semiconductor fabs, though much of that is infrastructure and may not yet be counted as R&D. India’s R&D is 0.84% of GDP (compared with China 2.58%, the US 3.45% and South Korea 4.94%) and it has 354 researchers per million people; the Anusandhan National Research Foundation, with a ₹50,000-crore corpus to be largely raised from private sources, was created to expand research capacity.

The Indian Opinion

The coverage highlights a large statistical change, but readers should note two cautions. First, part of the apparent leap reflects improved measurement and new reporting requirements rather than an uninterrupted surge in fresh corporate research outlay; this weakens claims that corporate behaviour alone has shifted dramatically. Second, while new investments in AI and semiconductor infrastructure are promising, infrastructure spending is not the same as active research and may not immediately increase researcher capacity. Sensational headlines describing a complete reversal of India’s research landscape overstate what the data can prove; the real test will be sustained funding and the country’s ability to train and retain specialised researchers, as the Anusandhan fund aims to do but has yet to deliver.

Original article: Quantum shift: On private industry and national research spending (www.thehindu.com)

This story was summarised and commented on by AI from the source linked above.