At a moment when India is trying to move from incremental innovation to deep-tech leadership, Anusandhan National Research Foundation chief executive Shivkumar Kalyanaraman has argued that the country cannot afford to wait decades for its research system to mature. Speaking on the need to scale India's research multiplier, he framed the challenge as one of capital design, institutional speed and commercial translation rather than simply higher spending.
India's gross expenditure on research and development remains well below the levels seen in advanced innovation economies, and policymakers have repeatedly said the country must lift R&D spending toward 3% of GDP. Kalyanaraman's intervention is significant because it shifts the debate from a narrow public-funding question to a broader architecture in which government, venture capital, industry and academia each play a distinct role. His central message was that the country needs patient capital that can absorb long development cycles while still creating pathways to market.
Patient Capital Model
Kalyanaraman described a framework that blends private investment with public mission funding and open IP licensing. The idea is to de-risk early research, allow promising technologies to move beyond the laboratory, and then enable commercial scale-up through market capital. In practice, that means public institutions would not only finance discovery but also structure research outputs so they can be licensed, adapted or co-developed by startups and industry partners.
The emphasis on open intellectual-property licensing is especially notable. India's research ecosystem has often struggled with a gap between academic output and commercial deployment, partly because ownership structures and licensing terms can slow adoption. By making more research outputs accessible under clear, usable terms, ANRF appears to be betting that startups and venture-backed companies can become the transmission mechanism between public science and industrial application.
This approach also reflects a broader global lesson: breakthrough innovation rarely scales through grants alone. It requires a financing stack that can carry ideas from proof-of-concept to prototype, from prototype to pilot, and from pilot to revenue. Kalyanaraman's formulation suggests that India's research multiplier will rise only if capital is sequenced to match those stages, rather than being concentrated at the front end.
Mission-Led Innovation Push
The second pillar of the model is national mission programmes. These are intended to concentrate resources on strategic areas where India wants both scientific capability and economic advantage. Mission-led funding can create demand certainty, attract private co-investment and reduce fragmentation across ministries and institutions. For startups, such programmes can provide the first credible customer, the first validation environment and, in some cases, the first route to scale.
That matters because India's startup ecosystem has already shown it can build at speed when market signals are clear. What has been missing in many deep-tech categories is not entrepreneurial energy, but long-horizon capital and institutional demand. By linking mission programmes to research translation, ANRF is effectively trying to create a pipeline in which public science does not end at publication, but at deployable technology.
The broader policy significance is substantial. If India is to raise R&D intensity toward 3% of GDP, the increase cannot come from the state alone. It will require private sector participation, stronger university-industry collaboration and a more efficient mechanism for turning research into intellectual property, products and companies. Kalyanaraman's comments indicate that ANRF sees itself not merely as a funding body, but as a systems architect for innovation.
Scaling The Research Multiplier
The phrase "research multiplier" captures the core of the argument: one rupee of research spending should generate more than one rupee of economic value over time through patents, startups, manufacturing capability and strategic autonomy. But that multiplier is only possible if the ecosystem reduces friction at every stage, from grant approval to licensing to procurement.
For India's venture capital community, the message is equally clear. Deep-tech investing will need more patience than consumer internet cycles, more tolerance for technical uncertainty and closer engagement with public institutions. For policymakers, the task is to ensure that research funding is not trapped in isolated silos, but connected to industrial strategy and startup formation.
Kalyanaraman's remarks arrive as India seeks to position itself as both a knowledge economy and a manufacturing power. The underlying bet is that scientific capacity, if properly financed and commercialised, can become a source of national competitiveness. The challenge is execution: building a system that rewards discovery, accelerates translation and keeps capital in the game long enough for breakthroughs to matter.
In that sense, the warning embedded in his message is as important as the policy proposal itself. India, he suggested, cannot wait 75 years for its research system to catch up. The country must compress that timeline by designing institutions and capital flows that make innovation faster, more open and more investable.