India's debate on R&D is often framed around a familiar metric: expenditure as a share of GDP. Comparisons with China, South Korea, Israel, and the US frequently lead to the conclusion that India needs to spend more on science and technology. Greater investment remains important. Yet expenditure alone reveals little about how effectively existing scientific resources are being used.
Over the past several decades, India has built an extensive public research ecosystem spanning agriculture, health, industry, and emerging technologies. But innovation outcomes have not always reflected the scale of these investments. This raises a broader question for India's innovation strategy. Alongside the creation of scientific assets, how effectively is the country creating pathways through which those assets can be used?
The Real Constraint Is Institutional Absorption
India already possesses one of the world's largest publicly funded research ecosystems. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) alone operates 73 institutes and 11 national research centres, while the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) together manage dozens of additional institutes and laboratories. Institutions supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) have further expanded scientific capabilities across agriculture, health, engineering, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and other strategic sectors.
Despite this scale, access to advanced research environments remains uneven. Universities often struggle to provide students with specialised equipment, high-end facilities, and sustained exposure to frontier research. At the same time, many national laboratories remain only loosely connected to the broader higher education system. Opportunities for engagement frequently depend on individual collaborations, personal networks, or short-term internships rather than institutionalised pathways.
This disconnect creates an institutional absorption gap: the growth of scientific assets has outpaced a comparable expansion in participation. The challenge is therefore not one of infrastructure alone. It is also a question of how scientific resources are organised, accessed, and shared across the wider research community.
When Scientific Assets Remain Disconnected
The significance of the institutional absorption gap extends beyond universities and laboratories. It affects how effectively scientific investment is converted into new knowledge, technologies, and national innovation capability.
The consequences are cumulative. Knowledge circulates more slowly, opportunities for interdisciplinary research become more limited, and fewer researchers gain exposure to advanced scientific environments. Students seeking such opportunities often look abroad, while institutions with weaker research infrastructure struggle to participate fully in frontier areas of inquiry.
Over time, these constraints affect India's ability to build capabilities in strategically important fields, from biotechnology and artificial intelligence to climate science, advanced agriculture, and precision medicine.
Global Leaders Build Networks, Not Laboratories Alone
The world's most successful research systems derive their strength from more than scientific capabilities alone. In the US national laboratories maintain close relationships with universities and private firms. Germany's Fraunhofer Institutes operate through sustained collaboration between academia and industry. China has increasingly aligned universities, state laboratories, and industrial policy within broader national missions.
The forms vary across countries, yet a common principle emerges. Scientific assets generate greater value when they operate as an interconnected system, reflecting the ease with which people, ideas, and resources move within it.
Turning Public Laboratories into National Research Campuses
India already possesses the ingredients required for such a model, including scientific talent, public research institutions, and expanding technological capabilities. The policy challenge lies in strengthening the connections that allow these institutions to function as an integrated system.
One approach would be to reimagine major public laboratories as National Research Campuses. Scientific infrastructure funded through public resources should increasingly be treated as a national asset rather than an institutional asset. The objective is not to weaken institutional autonomy, but to expand participation in the country’s existing research capacity. Laboratories, specialised facilities, and research expertise represent public investments whose value increases when they are accessible to a broader community of students, researchers, and innovators.
This principle could be operationalised through several complementary mechanisms. Universities could establish joint-degree and co-supervision arrangements with national laboratories, allowing students to conduct research using advanced facilities regardless of their home institution. A National Research Mobility Fellowship could support postgraduate and doctoral researchers working across institutions, enabling talent to move towards expertise, facilities, and research opportunities rather than remaining constrained by organisational boundaries.
Public laboratories could also play a larger role in organising challenge-based research programmes to align scientific training more closely with national priorities while encouraging collaboration across disciplines and institutions.
The success of these reforms will depend in part on changes to institutional incentives. Performance assessment frameworks can recognise contributions to student mentoring, technology diffusion, startup incubation, institutional collaboration, and broader societal outcomes alongside traditional research metrics.
The Next Stage of India's Innovation Journey
India's first generation of science policy focused on building institutions. The next generation may need to focus on designing the rules, incentives, and pathways that allow those institutions to generate value collectively. The question facing policymakers is therefore how effectively that infrastructure can support a larger and more diverse community of researchers, innovators, and problem-solvers.
The quality of those institutional arrangements may increasingly shape India's ability to compete in a knowledge-intensive world.