In a quest to boost private sector research and development in India, the Union Budget has allocated ₹20,000 crore to the Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST) for “research, development and innovation”, which several scientists have described as “historic”.
Typically, the Ministry’s annual budget has averaged around ₹6,000 crore to ₹8,000 crore.
“This is a historic allocation and could go a long way towards encouraging research and development investments in the private sector,” said Ashutosh Sharma, a former Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology (DST). “The number of startups have dramatically increased and our future investments have to reflect this.”
Scaling up
Last year, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had indicated in her interim Budget speech that a “corpus of ₹1 lakh crore” would be established with a fifty-year interest-free loan. “The corpus will provide long-term financing or refinancing with long tenures and low or nil interest rates. This will encourage the private sector to scale up research and innovation significantly in sunrise domains. We need to have programmes that combine the powers of our youth and technology,” she remarked in her address.
Science Ministry officials said that the current allocation was related to this corpus. “This first tranche of ₹20,000 crore is part of the fund announced in the July [2024] Budget and will be used to fund the private sector and startups in sunrise sectors,” DST Secretary Abhay Karandikar told The Hindu.
Largest funder
The Ministry is the country’s largest civilian funder of basic science research and expects to spend ₹28,508 crore in 2025-26, up from ₹5,661 crore this year. In 2023-24, it actually spent ₹4,002 crore.
The field is broad enough to encompass a variety of sectors. “Several startups in biotechnology, for instance, too can access these funds,” said Rajesh Gokhale, Secretary of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) which, along with the DST and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), constitute the Ministry of Science and Technology.
The DBT has been provisioned ₹3,446 crore, a 50% jump from the ₹2,440 crore allocated in 2024-25. The CSIR expects to spend ₹6,657.78 crore in 2025-26 similar to the ₹6,350 crore spent in 2024-25.
India currently spends less than 1% of its GDP on research and development, which is low compared to technologically advanced countries. A major reason for this, experts have said, is the limited participation by the private sector — now hovering around 30% — in core research and development.
Published – February 01, 2025 09:54 pm IST
