40th…Now What?: India’s innovation rank is still too low

It’s good news that India now ranks 40 in the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s global innovation index, having climbed 26 ranks in the past decade. But it must be seen in context. Other middle-income countries like Turkey, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Iran have accomplished even steeper climbs. The plain takeaway is that while the global innovation environment is full of novel opportunities, the competition is tough and will only keep getting tougher.

The index notes for example that fulfilling Moore’s Law (which predicts that the speed and capability of computer chips will double every 18-24 months) has become increasingly expensive. Factories designed to produce advanced chips cost more than $20 billion each. On such fronts, India’s relatively low R&D spend has grave significance for its long-term competitiveness. Although the significance of this deficit has been widely discussed for some time now, the delivery date of significant remediation is yet to become clear. A second point worth highlighting is that compared to China’s 24 and US’s 21, India has only 4 S&T clusters among the world’s top 100. Japan, Canada and South Korea also have 4 clusters each but each of their population is only a slight fraction of India’s. That innovation and capital formation still remain overwhelmingly concentrated in Bengaluru, Delhi, Chennai and Mumbai means that too much of this vast country’s potential is still going waste.

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