Science and Technology in India: Achievements, Challenges, and Future Outlook

From building rockets that reached the Moon’s south pole to running one of the world’s largest IT industries, the journey of science and technology after 1947 is a story of remarkable ambition. A nation that inherited a broken economy and an imported industrial base has grown into a recognised global player in space, nuclear energy, and digital services. Yet this progress sits alongside persistent gaps: low research spending, weak links between laboratories and industry, and a scientific establishment that has struggled to connect with the lives of ordinary people. Understanding this mix of triumph and tension is essential to making sense of where the country’s S&T sector stands today and where it is headed.

The foundations laid after independence 🔗

When the country became independent in 1947, its leaders saw science as a tool for nation-building. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru believed that science alone could solve the problems of hunger and poverty, and he pushed to build a scientific temper across society. This was not just academic idealism. It translated into a deliberate plan to create institutions capable of delivering self-reliance in critical sectors.

The early decades saw a wave of institution-building. The first Indian Institute of Technology was inaugurated at Kharagpur in 1951 to create a world-class technical workforce. The Atomic Energy Commission was set up in 1948 under Homi J. Bhabha, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research was revitalised, and national laboratories such as the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory came up to anchor applied research. The Planning Commission, established in 1950, channelled investment into science, technology, infrastructure, and education through successive Five Year Plans.

This state-led model reflected a wider reality. As in many post-colonial countries, the state played a major role in using science and technology for national development, treating it as a public mission rather than leaving it to markets. The result was a sizeable scientific infrastructure built within just five decades.

Major achievements across sectors 🔗

The investments of those early decades produced concrete results across several high-priority fields.

Space research 🔗

The space programme is perhaps the most visible success. The first lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, was launched in 2008 and helped confirm the presence of water molecules on the Moon. The momentum has only grown since, with later missions building a reputation for low-cost, high-impact engineering. The organisation has also become a commercial launch provider, and recent work shows growing depth: IIT Madras and ISRO jointly developed India’s first indigenous semiconductor chip for space applications, signalling a shift towards building core components at home rather than importing them.

Nuclear energy 🔗

Nuclear capability was a second major thrust. The country conducted underground nuclear tests at Pokhran in Rajasthan in 1998, an achievement marked by the declaration of National Technology Day. The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and a network of related institutions have supported both energy generation and strategic objectives, fulfilling the early vision of harnessing nuclear power for national use.

Biotechnology, agriculture, and health 🔗

The Green Revolution transformed agriculture through high-yielding crop varieties and modern farming techniques, helping the country move towards food security. In public health, sustained government campaigns made the country polio-free within two decades, a striking achievement for a population of this scale. Biotechnology has since emerged as a fast-growing field, with research institutions and a maturing pharmaceutical industry making the country a significant producer of vaccines and generic medicines.

Information technology 🔗

The IT and software services industry is a more recent but enormous success. The sector is projected to reach around US$350 billion in revenue, while a growing ecosystem of global capability centres employs nearly two million professionals. The country is also among the top producers of STEM graduates and scientific publications worldwide, giving it deep human capital to draw on.

The colonial legacy and its lasting effects 🔗

To understand the challenges that remain, it helps to look at where the system started. The British period reshaped the scientific and technological landscape in ways that still echo today.

Science as a tool of empire 🔗

Under colonial rule, science and technology were largely instruments of control and extraction. Historians describe how colonial science focused on exploiting human, natural, and agricultural resources through surveys and exploratory projects designed to maximise revenue. Railways and the telegraph were introduced, but primarily to serve administrative and commercial needs of the empire rather than broad-based development.

The suppression of indigenous knowledge 🔗

This period also disrupted older systems of knowledge. Colonial education policy was inherently biased against native traditions, and as a result indigenous technical knowledge was not mainstreamed into formal education. Centuries of colonisation left limited awareness of the country’s own scientific and technological heritage. Even today, a vast body of ancient manuscripts remains untranslated, meaning much traditional knowledge is yet to be studied systematically.

The dual production system 🔗

One lasting consequence is what scholars describe as a dual structure. On one side sits a modern, high-technology sector built largely on imported designs and serving organised industry and the state. On the other sits a vast informal economy of artisans, small producers, and rural communities operating with traditional or low-cost methods. The two rarely connect. Colonial deindustrialisation left an economy heavily dependent on agriculture and raw material exports, a structure that persisted long after independence and that the modern S&T establishment has not fully integrated.

Persistent challenges in the system 🔗

Beyond historical inheritance, several structural problems continue to limit the sector’s full potential.

Low spending on research and development 🔗

The most basic constraint is money. The country spends only about 0.64% of GDP on R&D, far below China at over 2.4%, the United States at around 3.5%, and Israel at over 5.7%. While gross R&D expenditure has more than doubled in absolute terms over the past decade, it has stayed stuck in the 0.6% to 0.7% range as a share of the economy, which is below the global average.

Over-dependence on government funding 🔗

A related weakness is the heavy reliance on the state. The private sector contributed only around 36% of R&D funding in 2020-21, compared with more than 70% in countries like China and the United States. This means the burden of funding research falls disproportionately on public institutions, and private firms invest little in innovation of their own.

Weak links between research and industry 🔗

Research institutions and industries often operate in silos, which reduces the chances that discoveries become commercial products. Much of the work done by major government agencies struggles to translate into market-ready technology because of bureaucratic hurdles in technology transfer. R&D has also historically concentrated on a few priority areas like defence and space, leaving large parts of industry under-served.

Bureaucracy and the grassroots gap 🔗

The structure that built the system in the first place can also slow it down. A centralised, bureaucratic establishment is well suited to large strategic projects but less responsive to the everyday needs of farmers, artisans, and small enterprises. This is the practical face of the dual system: cutting-edge laboratories exist alongside communities whose problems and knowledge rarely enter the formal research agenda.

The future outlook 🔗

Despite these gaps, the direction of travel is encouraging, driven by policy reform, private participation, and a growing role for civil society.

Policy reform and private participation 🔗

Policy is shifting to address the funding problem directly. The draft Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy of 2020 aims to double gross domestic R&D expenditure every five years and to double the private sector’s contribution. Since 2019, companies have been allowed to use part of their corporate social responsibility funds to support research at public incubators, universities, and research organisations. Newer initiatives, including the Anusandhan National Research Foundation and a large innovation fund announced in the 2025-26 budget, are designed to pull more private and philanthropic money into deep-tech research.

The start-up ecosystem reflects this momentum. Patent filings have grown sharply, and the country’s rank on the Global Innovation Index rose from 81st in 2015 to 40th in 2023, even as funding levels remain modest.

NGOs and grassroots innovation 🔗

One of the most promising trends addresses the grassroots gap head-on. Civil society organisations are working to connect formal science with the informal economy and traditional knowledge. The Honey Bee Network, supported by the NGO SRISTI, is a leading example. It is a collective that documents appropriate technology, grassroots innovation, and medicinal plant knowledge from villages, and over its life it has recorded more than 100,000 ideas and traditional practices. Crucially, it publishes its newsletter in several languages so that contributors who do not read English or use the internet can still benefit, building pride in indigenous wisdom and community self-reliance.

This kind of work matters because it begins to dissolve the dual system. By scouting, validating, and spreading innovations created by ordinary people, networks like this bring the informal sector into the innovation conversation rather than leaving it on the margins. The recognition of figures like Anil Gupta, who founded the network, signals growing institutional acceptance of grassroots creativity as a genuine source of technology.

A more inclusive and dynamic ecosystem 🔗

The combined effect of these trends points towards a broader and more participatory S&T environment. Government missions in areas like deep-ocean exploration, semiconductors, and digital infrastructure continue to expand the frontier, while private firms, start-ups, and NGOs add diversity and reach. The challenge ahead is to ensure that growth at the top connects with innovation at the base, so that scientific capacity serves the whole population and not just a few advanced sectors.

What do you think? Can a country genuinely become a science and technology leader while spending less than 1% of its GDP on research, and what would it take to bring the private sector fully on board? And how much weight should the future innovation agenda give to grassroots and traditional knowledge compared with high-technology fields like space and semiconductors?

References

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12. https://www.localfutures.org/programs/global-to-local/planet-local/culture/honey-bee-network/