Why do lab-to-market gaps persist in Indian public R&D? Evaluate the industry co-creation model.

India's gross expenditure on R&D is only about 0.64% of GDP, and the Central Government funds 43.7% of it against just 36.4% from private industry [1]. Public laboratories therefore invent without a paying customer — the structural root of the lab-to-market gap that the 85th CSIR Foundation Day address sought to close through "industry co-creation" [2].

Why the gap persists

• Financing structure: with the taxpayer carrying product risk, no firm has money at stake in the outcome; India spent 0.7% of GDP on R&D against China's 2.1% in 2017-18 [1].
• Late industry entry: industry is brought in at the licensing stage, not at problem definition — hence the call to treat it as a "co-creator, not only a partner" [2].
• Incentive mismatch in institutions: labs are judged by publications, not by technology sold; areas of critical technological dependence remain unlisted [2].
• Depth of dependence: India assembles but does not own the technology inside — electronics imports were about USD 98.6 billion against USD 38.5 billion of exports in FY 2024-25 [3].

Evaluating co-creation: merits

• Market signals discipline cost and quality — essential if India is to be a technology provider, not merely an import substituter [2].
• It is already institutionalised: the RDI Scheme (Cabinet approval July 2025) offers a ₹1 lakh crore corpus of low/nil-interest long-tenure finance and a Deep-Tech Fund of Funds under ANRF [4]; the India Semiconductor Mission 2.0 targets full-stack Indian design IP [3].

Limits

• Frontier technologies have no near-term buyer; the National Quantum Mission is wholly state-funded, as were space and atomic energy [2].
• The model over-assumes private willingness: ANRF expects ₹36,000 crore of its ₹50,000 crore (2023-28) from non-government donors, though industry funds barely a third of national R&D today [1][5].

Verdict: co-creation is sound for scale-up but cannot substitute for public funding of invention. The state should finance discovery and use instruments like the RDI corpus to make industry own commercialisation, with each lab publishing dependency areas, named partners and timelines — turning technological sovereignty from aspiration into audited outcome.