Economic Survey 2024: India Far Behind China In High-Quality Research; This Could Be One Reason Why

India is far behind China and the US in terms of high-quality research.

The Economic Survey 2023-24, tabled by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in Parliament today (22 July), listed some possible reasons why India is so far behind China and the United States.

The reason could be the low Gross Expenditure on Research and Development (GERD) by the private sector, which is just 36.4 per cent, compared to 77 per cent in China and 75 per cent in the United States.

That is why India's investments in R&D as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) have been very low at just 0.64 per cent compared to China's 2.41 per cent, the US’s 3.47 per cent, and even Israel, which spends a whopping 5.71 per cent of its GDP on R&D.

However, things have started to improve in the past few years.

Nearly one lakh patents were granted in FY24 compared to just 25,000 patents granted in FY20. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), India saw the largest increase (31.6 per cent) in patent filings in 2022.

India has now started to increase its GERD.

The spending on R&D has now doubled from Rs 60,196.8 crore in FY11 to Rs 127,381 crore in FY21.

In Nature's Index 2023, India overtook Australia and Switzerland and climbed to ninth rank in the number of high-quality research papers filed, seeing a 44 per cent increase in the past four years from 1,039.7 papers in 2019 to 1,474.7 in 2023, however, India still trails behind China and the US which have 20,000 papers.