What India needs to become a major research hub | Economic Times

India’s research and development intensive (RDI) industry is growing in its reach as more manufacturing becomes RDI. For example, self-driving cars now need advanced computing and sensor technology, transforming a mid-tech auto sector into a hi-tech one.The US share of global RDI sector is about 31%, and China’s is 22%. India’s current share is negligible. The RDI sector is extremely difficult to enter, thanks to huge investments and high skill sets needed. The RDI segment is, importantly, globally intertwined, and no nation is ‘self-sufficient’. Even the ubiquitous smartphone uses technologies sourced from about a dozen countries. India’s goal, therefore, must be to become a significant — say, 5% — global market share participant in this sector within the next two decades. To achieve this, it needs clarity of vision, perseverance and fundamental changes.The key is a triple helix partnership. The first helix is government, which has a cornerstone role through policy support and investments. Policies could include prioritisation of frontier technologies, measures to attract global talent and capital investments, and R&D-friendly taxation. GoI must also invest in city-scale physical infrastructure and increase funding for both public and private sector research institutions.The second helix is research universities. India needs world-class universities whose innovation and entrepreneurship can fuel RDI industries. Alumni and faculty of Stanford University in the US, for instance, have created nearly 40,000 companies that generate about $2.7 trillion in annual revenues. Industry and university partnerships, like the US’ Stanford University-Silicon Valley and China’s Tsinghua University Zhongguancun Science Park, are great success stories. They are also a testament to government’s role in promoting a hi-tech ecosystem.The third helix is the RDI industry itself. These companies are best built in the private sector. Creating such an industry faces massive barriers and will take decades of investment. To succeed, it needs the other two helices to be firmly in place.What is India’s status in research universities? Its premier education institutions generate well-trained manpower for domestic and global corporations. However, our universities are not at the levels needed to spur RDI industries, and university rankings are a measure of this potential. No doubt universities in advanced economies with a long tradition of research excellence dominate global rankings. But China, which began to focus on research universities only from the early 1980s, now has seven in the top 100, and over 50 in the top 500.India needs pre-eminent research universities to build an advanced technology economy. An ambitious goal can be five research universities in the top 100 rankings within the next 25-40 years. One way is for the private sector to build them.One, research universities need the autonomy and flexibility to compete for, and attract, exceptional international researchers. Two, they need to nurture innovation and entrepreneurship with close links to the best global ecosystems. Three, they will need state and central governments to enact favourable regulations. Four, they must also be able to compete on an equal footing with public universities for government research contracts and grants.Most importantly, such research universities will need to attract very large endowments, in the range of over $1 billion, and support financial models to be able to compete with top-tier universities. To this end, they need to be backed by visionary high net-worth individuals. No doubt this will take decades of support and perseverance. But that is how today’s leading research universities in the world were built.India’s gap in high-end and frontier technologies — semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum physics, genetics, etc — is growing exponentially, and its vulnerabilities are made worse by the new threats of technology-denial even in commercial sectors. To resist technology colonisation, India needs to become a producer of high-end and frontier technologies, as well as become a major research hub, rather than remain an importer and consumer of such technologies.