India Promised Its Scientists No Dearth of Resources. It Must Now Shift from Frugality to National Capability.
The Prime Minister's promise of no dearth of resources is not a call to spend more, but to complete the shift from frugality to national capability. That takes three things beyond just a cheque: conviction in the builders, a value roadmap for the talent, and Indian buyers who purchase Indian R&D for the long term.
In September 2024, at the first meeting of the Governing Board of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation, the Prime Minister told India's scientists that there would be no dearth of resources for their endeavours, and that they should have faith. That promise is a genuine turning point, and it means a lot to a nation of builders and innovators to hear their Prime Minister voice this intent.
The companies and institutions now solving India's hardest problems, in space, defence, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, robotics, AI, and nuclear energy, will decide its standing in the world, and for a decade India has proved it can reach their frontier cheaply. The harder task now is to build national capability and technological moats, and capability of that kind is not finished by resources alone. It is completed by three moves the promise makes possible, backing builders with conviction, assigning real value to talent, and turning Indian buyers into long-term purchasers of Indian R&D.
The arithmetic of necessity has changed, and recently it became visible when more than 100 experienced scientists resigned from ISRO. Read constructively, that departure is not a scandal. It is the clearest signal yet that the frugality era has reached its limit.
The Arithmetic of Necessity Has Ended the Case for Frugality
Frugality was the right instinct when the prize was a single milestone, and the arithmetic that justified it has since changed. India's proudest achievements are cost achievements. The Mars Orbiter Mission cost about 450 crore rupees, less than the $100 million Hollywood spent on the film Gravity, and Chandrayaan-3 reached the lunar south pole for around 615 crore, each on a fraction of NASA's budget. These are extraordinary feats, and they were the correct way to enter the race.
The demand India now faces is of a different order. Artificial intelligence and the energy to run it, advanced semiconductors, defence platforms, quantum computing, and reusable launch are not milestones but platforms, and platforms are not won on thrift. A leading-edge chip fab runs to tens of billions of dollars, a frontier AI model to hundreds of millions in compute alone, and a reusable rocket to years of funded failure before the first success.
They are won at the top of the cost curve, in owned intellectual property, deep science and research, and highly specialised talent, which is precisely where India still underspends. Gross Expenditure on Research and Development (GERD) has grown from 0.64% of GDP in 2020-21 to 0.84% in 2023-24, nearly doubling from ₹1.27 lakh crore in 2020–21 to ₹2.45 lakh crore in 2023–24. The private sector contributed ₹1.26 lakh crore and accounted for 51.8% of India's GERD in 2023-24, the highest share in recent years. The increase to 0.84% so quickly suggests that GERD is beginning to outpace economic growth, and private sector allocations are growing even faster. This is a positive signal for India's long-term research and innovation ecosystem.
However, this is still catching up to the 1.8% average worldwide, 2.7% in China, and 3.6% in the United States, and more than 70% of that comes from private industry in advanced economies.
Frugality wins the first result. Capability grows the category, and the arithmetic of necessity now points towards investing in that capability.
Conviction Means A Whole Chain Backing of Builders, Not Only Funding Them
The resources are now committed, and conviction is the next move that turns grants into capability. Conviction is shown by trust and autonomy, not only by announcements, and the attitude the shift must leave behind revealed itself this year.
Roughly 700 scientists have left ISRO since 2012 and the agency runs below sanctioned strength with more than 1,600 vacancies, and after around 80 recent departures from the UR Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru and more than 20 from the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, drawn by private firms offering higher salaries, equity, and early leadership, the Department of Space issued a memorandum on 14 July 2026 directing centres not to routinely accept resignations from Group A personnel on strategic missions, reversing a 2020 decision that had delegated that authority to centre directors.
Officials have since sought to play down the numbers, yet the memorandum itself is the measure of the anxiety. The reflexive reading treats this as a discipline problem. We read it as a conviction problem, because a state that answers an exit with a lock rather than a pay raise has met its best minds with bureaucratic bullying instead of belief. The private market here is not the adversary. It is valuing these scientists correctly for the first time, and the productive response is to compete for them, by trusting their judgment, giving mission leaders more autonomy, and standing behind bold work. Instead, most of the best scientists in government agencies are underpaid and paranoid about their promotions that are threatened when they take technological risks.
Capability Is Built by People, and India Must Value Them
Capability is created by people, so the surest test of the shift is whether the state assigns talent its true value. Today it does not. A newly recruited ISRO scientist enters at Level 10 of the pay matrix on a basic of 56,100 rupees per month, the same rung and figure as a probationary IAS officer, while the ISRO chairman's basic is capped at 2.5 lakh a month, the ceiling set for the Cabinet Secretary.
The state stands in three relationships to these people at once, as their employer, as a customer buying launches and components from the firms that recruit them, and as a competitor for the same talent, and a grid that pays a propulsion engineer like a generalist administrator prices irreplaceable minds as fungible cattle. Pay is only the most measurable part of the problem, which runs equally to recognition, visibility on career progression, and the autonomy to lead.
The remedy is neither exotic nor costly against the missions it protects. It is a distinct compensation track for scientific and technical cadres, benchmarked to the task rather than folded into the administrative matrix. Singapore built exactly this, identifying scientific talent from school through its A*STAR awards, funding the strongest to a PhD, then letting them circulate between national laboratories, industry, and startups. The state that intends to keep its scientists competes for them.
Capability Compounds Only When Indian Buyers Back Indian R&D
Capability compounds only where a committed buyer purchases from it year after year, and this is the leg India has left thin. The State as anchor customer is necessary and not sufficient on its own, because Indian corporates must also become long-term purchasers of Indian R&D rather than importers of finished foreign platforms.
India still imports almost all of its advanced chips and has ranked among the world's largest arms importers for years, and a market that keeps buying mature foreign technology while its own laboratories are still behind locks itself into dependency and starves the builders it means to create.
The opening is real and can be widened. IN-SPACe has carried India past 400 space startups, with structured access to ISRO's test beds and about $150 million facilitated into the sector in 2025, but access to a test bed is not an order book, and demand is what converts a promising laboratory into a durable firm.
The prize is large, with India's space economy alone projected to cross $40 billion by 2033, and it is won by whoever owns the technology rather than those just assembling it. ANRF's own partnerships, from its industry-relevant research grants to its PAIR programme, point the right way and should scale into committed, long-tenure purchasing. Grant capital and multi-year contracts are what let a prime contractor seed the tiers of specialist suppliers beneath it, and what let a startup that owns a critical component grow into a National Champion.
Conviction Must Reach the Laboratory, Not Stop at the Board
The resources the promise guaranteed must reach the lab bench, which means the delivery machinery has to match the ambition of the mandate.
The 1 lakh crore rupee Research, Development and Innovation Scheme, launched in November 2025 with its governing board chaired by the Prime Minister, is the clearest expression of that intent, yet it is routed through an executive council, an empowered group of secretaries, and two tiers of fund managers before it reaches an innovator. The official who disburses boldly is exposed to years of audit, while the official who sits on the fence faces none, so the safest career choice becomes the one that spends nothing.
The warning is already on record, in an earlier incentive scheme where, five years after launch, only a small share of the committed outlay had reached its recipients. The RDI risks the same if another year passes and the allocations do not reach the builders who need them. The fixes are practical and within reach, namely statutory protection for good-faith decisions taken within sanctioned guidelines and transmission timelines that hold the approval committees to a regular cadence of deployment.
The pattern is not confined to new initiatives. DRDO has lived it for two decades, and the same exposure runs through nuclear energy and cybersecurity, where the private market for the best people is deepest. When conviction reaches the lab, a promise becomes capability.
National Capability Begins When the State Keeps Its Word
The Prime Minister's promise is the right one, and keeping it will take more than resources. It will take conviction in the builders, real value for the talent, and demand for what they make, sustained across years and governments. Equally importantly, it will take urgency to evolve from frugality and cost optimisation towards capability creation.
The arithmetic of necessity says the moment is now, while the missions are funded, the needs are urgent, and the talent is still in the country. The deepest resource a nation can promise its scientists is more than capital. It is the long term certainty that it will back them, pay them, and buy what they build.
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