Transport, pharma and biotech as industry become India’s biggest research investors

India’s private-sector research effort is now being driven overwhelmingly by the transportation, pharmaceutical, biotechnology and information technology industries, with transport companies emerging as the country’s largest corporate R&D investors, according to the Department of Science and Technology’s (DST) Research and Development Statistics 2025-26.

The report also shows that industry now employs more researchers than the public sector in core R&D activities, underscoring a broader shift in the country’s innovation landscape.

The report follows a disclosure by the DST in the Lok Sabha last week that showed India’s spending on research and development (R&D) surged to 0.83% of GDP in 2021-22, the first time that the country crossed the 0.8% threshold since 2009-10. The report estimates that India’s R&D expenditure will approach 0.9% of GDP in 2025-26.

The figures also reveal a structural shift in India’s innovation landscape: private industry accounted for 45.5% of national R&D spending in 2021-22, rising further to 51.8% in 2023-24, the first time businesses have contributed more to India’s research effort than all levels of government combined. 

Transportation companies spent ₹39,137 crore on research and development in 2023-24, making them the single largest industrial R&D contributor, followed by drugs and pharmaceuticals (₹25,847 crore), biotechnology (₹10,321 crore), information technology (₹9,587 crore) and electrical and electronics (₹6,779 crore). Together, these sectors accounted for the bulk of private industrial research expenditure.

The latest figures represent a marked departure from the pattern seen in the last publicly available DST statistical compendium released in 2020, which contained data up to 2018-19. At that time, pharmaceuticals and transportation were already among the country’s leading industrial research sectors, but transportation R&D was only around ₹14,000 crore while biotechnology and information technology accounted for a much smaller share of industrial research spending. Since then, the transport-sector R&D has almost tripled, biotechnology has emerged as one of India’s largest research-intensive industries, and IT has joined the country’s leading corporate R&D spenders.

An official, who declined to be identified but was familiar with the data compendium, attributed the sharp rise in private sector spending to “post covid.” The “realisation” that investments in R&D were “critical” to companies’ future prompted greater investments, he told The Hindu. Though nearly 8,000-odd companies populated the DST database, 90% of the R&D investments came from 500-odd companies. He underlined that the DST had not made any methodological changes to how it sourced this data from industries, which is done through self-reported questionnaires. Stricter requirements by the Reserve Bank of India on transparently disclosing R&D spends may also have played a role, he added.

The expansion in spending has been accompanied by a shift in India’s research workforce. The latest survey estimates that private industry employed more full-time equivalent (FTE) R&D personnel than government institutions in 2023-24, with business enterprises accounting for the largest pool of researchers and technical staff engaged in core research activities. In contrast, the 2020 edition of the report, based on 2017-18 data, showed government institutions—including central agencies, state organisations and higher educational institutions—as the dominant employers of India’s R&D workforce.

The report attributes the increase in private research primarily to business enterprises rather than private universities or research organisations. Of the ₹1.27 lakh crore spent by the private sector in 2023-24, private industry accounted for ₹1.11 lakh crore, while Scientific and Industrial Research Organisations (SIROs) contributed ₹7,798 crore and private higher educational institutions ₹9,164 crore.

The data also point to differing research intensities across industries. Biotechnology firms spent 16.8% of their sales turnover on R&D, among the highest of any industrial sector, while pharmaceuticals also ranked among the most research-intensive industries. Transportation, despite contributing the largest absolute investment, devoted a smaller share of turnover to research because of the industry’s much larger revenue base.