Sandeep Sharma (name changed on request) spent almost 15 years at a big tech firm in India, working in natural language processing—a field of research that enables computers to understand and replicate human language.
The IIT alumnus was hopeful that his strong research background and industry experience would lead to a professorship at one of the country’s elite institutes such as the IITs or the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). He was mistaken.
For the bureaucracy-driven institutions, Sharma says, his lack of academic experience turned out to be a dealbreaker.
“People in the field understand your value. But bureaucracy prevents one from considering industry experience at par with academic experience. So even with my 15–20 years in industry and being one of the top persons [in the field] in the country, they would not offer me a professor position,” he says.
Today, Sharma trains large language models (LLMs) in Indian languages at a lab in West Asia.
Sarkar’s story is not an exception. Many researchers who want to teach and work on foundational technologies in the country’s top educational institutions inevitably run into bureaucratic red tape. The result is a talent drain that undermines India’s R&D ambitions at a time when technological sovereignty has become the bedrock for geopolitical influence.
Every Step a Hurdle
Now take, for instance, Rajamani Vijayaraghavan, who chose to fight the system, eventually paving the way in breakthrough research domains such as quantum computing.
In 2012, the associate professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) steered the establishment of a new laboratory at the institute, which now houses a six-qubit quantum system. His research is at the cusp of giving birth to India’s first indigenous quantum computer.
While he acknowledges TIFR’s support, he also points to delays in fund approvals and the impact of policy changes. For example, it took him almost three years to get the first tranche of funds under the ₹200 crore funding programme by the Department of Science and Technology in 2017.
Though the funding landscape in India has improved over the years, Vijayaraghavan feels that utilising funds has become more difficult.
In 2020, the Centre introduced a policy requiring public-funded institutions to seek waivers before issuing global tenders for imports above ₹5 lakh. The move delayed his plans to procure equipment for research.
It’s no surprise then that the exodus of the brightest minds from India has gained pace in recent years. The number of Indians giving up their citizenship has almost doubled in the past decade from 1,29,328 in 2014 to 2,06,378 in 2024, shows a Rajya Sabha reply by the Ministry of External Affairs in March this year.
For those who decide to stay back, the options are working in routine roles or contributing to innovation but giving up intellectual property (IP) to foreign employers. “Companies like Infosys and TCS have always had a big pool for software engineers, but most fill run-of-the-mill roles. It doesn’t attract top talent,” says Sarkar.
A Country at a Crossroads
According to a study by the American Immigration Council, a non-profit, 29% of STEM workers in the United States in 2019 were Indian immigrants, beating China (10%) by a wide margin.
“The reason that the US is so far ahead in tech is because of its well-oiled machinery of finding and backing the next big thing. Let’s say today an MIT professor wants to make a semiconductor chip that works in -40°C. Nobody knows how that will be useful, but he would still get a $10mn research grant from Nasa [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] or Darpa [Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency],” says a deep-tech venture-capital (VC) investor.
“Now if the professor is successful in making the chip after five years, he will start a company and a VC will fund him to commercialise it. In another five years, it will become a billion dollars in revenue and go public. That’s how you will see another big tech company like Google or Nvidia emerge,” he adds.
India now stands at a critical inflection point. With every major nation racing to secure its tech future, government-backed research is becoming the launchpad. Unfortunately, India still lags behind.
India’s gross expenditure on R&D (GERD) has doubled in absolute terms from ₹60,196 crore in financial year 2011 to ₹1,27,381 crore in financial year 2021, but declined in percentage share of GDP from 0.82% to 0.64% in the same period.
There is a long-standing demand that the country raise its R&D spending to 3–4% of GDP, similar to China (2.4%) and the US (3.4%).
As a result, India lags in IP creation as well. The 2023 World Intellectual Property Indicators Report reveals a striking disparity in the global patent race: China led with 1.64mn filings, the US followed with 5,18,364 and India ranked sixth with 64,480 filings.
In fact, China’s spending on R&D as a percentage of its GDP has never seen a decline since 1996, data from the World Bank group shows.
“The results are there to see,” says a VC fund manager. “China now has the highest number of global patent applications per capita of GDP, the second-highest labour productivity growth in the world, the most number of PhDs per year and the highest share of high-tech exports,” he adds.
So, what’s the way forward? Experts say apart from significantly boosting investment in R&D, India needs to remove bureaucratic bottlenecks and create an ecosystem that encourages top talent to thrive at home.
The IIT Madras Model
An institute that has braved the odds and is pioneering the research-led innovation model in India is IIT Madras. The institute is credited with nurturing leading start-ups, such as EV-maker Ather and conversational AI firm Uniphore.
When Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain, the founders of Ather, first conceived their start-up, there was no ecosystem in place to turn their idea into a viable company.
“They [IIT Madras] literally opened up the classroom and labs to us 24*7. We could just go and camp there to build all our prototypes. The classroom and that lab combo became the first office for Ather, even before we started up,” writes Mehta in an Instagram post.
The institute’s consistent efforts are now paying off. In financial year 2025, its students, faculty and researchers filed 417 patents, more than its target of ‘one patent a day’.
The focus on fostering a culture of entrepreneurship and investment in infrastructure development has given it the status of India’s de facto innovation hub. And yet, it still faces its share of bureaucratic hurdles.
“There’s a lot of equipment that none of the institutions in the country have access to,” IIT Madras director V Kamakoti says. “It’s a chicken-and-egg situation. If we had the equipment, the people would come. But since we don’t have the people yet, we hesitate to buy the equipment.”
Still, the logjam is beginning to break. A new cryogenic electron microscopy facility, critical for studying biomolecular structures, has changed the game. “We’re now getting top-notch faculty because the facility exists. It's a validation of our belief: if you build it, they will come.”
But building a single facility won’t create a start-up nation. Kamakoti is pushing for something more ambitious—a national web of equipment. “All top-tier equipment must be made available across India,” he says. “And we need trained manpower to maintain them. Otherwise, we’re just importing metal for display.”
There’s also the invisible cost nobody talks about: upkeep. “An advanced piece of equipment might cost ₹1,000 crore, but you’ll need ₹200 crore more in AMC [Annual Maintenance Charges] over five years. If that’s not built into the grant, you’re planning for failure.”
So what will it take to truly transform India’s premier institutions into global innovation powerhouses?
His answer is audacious, but precise: “The budget for education must double every three years. That’s the minimum if we want to stay in the game.”
At IIT Madras, the blueprint is clear: make innovation habitual, infrastructure foundational and ambition non-negotiable. The rest, Kamakoti believes, will follow.
While IIT Madras stands out today, scaling such excellence across India will require significant and sustained investment, so that bright minds like Sharma and Vijayaraghavan can thrive without being burdened by bureaucratic barriers.
