India Innovates

From inventing zero to powering billions of digital transactions through UPI, India has consistently turned everyday challenges into creative, scalable solutions for the world. Its spirit of innovation draws strength from the fusion of ancient wisdom and cutting-edge technology. Whether through the digital revolution, remarkable achievements in space exploration or grassroots ingenuity, India has demonstrated a unique ability to adapt technology to its diverse and complex needs

These two events were representative of India’s resurgence as an innovating nation. India’s technological ambitions are for real

India has been a country of seekers. In ancient India, exploration was a way of life. It had strong traditions of study of astronomy, medical science, mathematics, and metallurgy, which fuelled its growth and made it one of the richest nations in the world. However, somewhere down the line, that zeal faded and India fell behind in the race of scientific achievements. We missed the Industrial Revolution and became dependent upon the West for products, machinery and technology that always came with caveats. After independence, Jawaharlal Nehru took the initiative to launch India into scientific orbit again: space, Atomic research and other cutting-edge technology initiatives were launched. Though modest at that time, over the years they grew into institutions that we can be proud of. The seeds of innovations were always present in India’s DNA, but now those seeds are sprouting.

On July 17, Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged off India’s first indigenously built hydrogen-powered train on an unassuming 89-kilometre stretch between Jind and Sonipat in Haryana. Barely a day later, a Hyderabad-based startup’s Vikram-1 rocket lifted off from Sriharikota and settled into a 450-kilometre orbit, making Skyroot Aerospace the first private Indian company - and India only the third nation after the United States and China — to reach orbit with a privately built launch vehicle.  These two events were representative of India’s resurgence as an innovating nation. It captured something real: India’s technological ambitions are no longer confined to white papers and five-year missions. Across railways, space, defence and semiconductors, indigenous innovation is beginning to show up in hardware, balance sheets and export invoices.

A rocket and a railway: Twin symbols of a wider shift

The hydrogen train, christened “NaMo Green Rail,” is a retrofitted ten-coach Diesel Electric Multiple Unit powered by a 1,200-kilowatt fuel cell system that combines hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity, releasing only water vapour. Designed by the Integral Coach Factory to specifications drawn up by the Research, Design and Standards Organisation, and fuelled by an electrolysis-based green hydrogen plant at Jind, it places India alongside Germany, Japan, China and the United States among the small group of countries running hydrogen-powered passenger rail - part of Indian Railways’ stated ambition to be net-zero by 2030.

Vikram-1’s achievement is more structurally significant. Its four-stage vehicle - three solid-fuel stages topped by a liquid-propellant kick stage - carried technology-demonstration payloads for Skyroot itself and three other Indian startups. ISRO and IN-SPACe supplied testing facilities, trajectory support and the launchpad, but the vehicle, the capital and the commercial risk were private. Skyroot became India’s first space-technology unicorn after a $60-million funding round in May, and the government now counts more than 400 space startups nationwide, with an official ambition to grow the domestic space economy nearly fivefold, from roughly $9 billion to $44 billion, over the next decade. The company is already developing the larger Vikram-2, slated for a first flight in 2027 with roughly three times the payload capacity - a sign that Skyroot is building for a launch cadence, not a single demonstration flight.

Hardening the strategic edge

Parallel gains are visible in defence. In May, DRDO successfully flight-tested an Agni-series missile fitted with Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicle technology from Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Island off Odisha - a capability that lets one missile engage several separated targets, and one that only a small number of nuclear-armed states possess. The test came almost exactly a year after Operation Sindoor, the May 2025 clashes with Pakistan that exposed both militaries’ growing reliance on drones and accelerated India’s own unmanned-systems programme.

That acceleration is now visible in the numbers. The armed forces’ UAV inventory grew from under a dozen platforms in 2020 to more than 140 across nine categories by March 2026, and the defence ministry is preparing what industry bodies describe as its largest-ever drone order, worth upward of $2 billion and reserved for domestic manufacturers. Indigenous programmes such as the stealth Ghatak combat drone are moving from design toward public demonstration.

The production and export numbers reinforce the picture. Defence output touched a record Rs 1.78 lakh crore in FY26, up 15.6 percent on the year and more than double the FY21 figure, according to the Ministry of Defence. Exports climbed 62.66 percent to Rs 38,424 crore, spanning BrahMos missiles, Akash air-defence systems, Pinaka rocket launchers and Swathi radars sold to more than 80 countries. Yet the limits of self-reliance remain visible too: HAL’s indigenous Tejas Mk1A fighter, ordered 83-strong in 2021, has faced repeated delivery delays tied to General Electric’s F404 engine supply chain - a reminder that even flagship “Make in India” platforms still lean on foreign propulsion.

The race for digital sovereignty

Semiconductors and artificial intelligence form the third leg of this story. The Union Cabinet’s mid-July approval of “Semicon 2.0” extends the Rs 76,000-crore India Semiconductor Mission into equipment, design IP and R&D centres, building on a portfolio that has already drawn roughly Rs 1.64 lakh crore in approved investment across a dozen projects. Assembly and testing plants run by Micron, Tata Electronics and CG Semi are now

operational in Gujarat and Assam; the flagship Tata Electronics-PSMC wafer fab at Dholera, built with the Taiwanese technology partner and backed by an ASML equipment agreement, is targeting first silicon by the end of 2026 - at mature process nodes rather than cutting-edge ones, a realistic if modest opening move into fabrication.

Design work is advancing faster than fabrication: in February, Qualcomm announced the tape-out of a 2-nanometre chip design from its engineering centres in Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad — now its largest engineering base outside the United States - a reminder that India’s semiconductor story runs through advanced chip design as much as through its newer assembly lines.

In artificial intelligence, the IndiaAI Mission has onboarded more than 38,000 GPUs for subsidised access by startups and researchers, working toward a stated target of 100,000 by year-end, while government-backed Sarvam AI has released open-weight foundation models trained substantially on Indian-language data.

From milestones to momentum

These are not isolated technical feats; they are beginning to register in the wider economy. India’s Production-Linked Incentive schemes, spanning fourteen sectors, had attracted cumulative investment of more than Rs 2.4 lakh crore and generated Rs 15.2 lakh crore in exports and roughly 14 lakh jobs by March 2026, according to the Commerce Ministry. Electronics manufacturing — anchored by mobile phones — has turned India from a net importer in 2014 into the world’s second-largest producer, with output more than doubling since FY20. Defence tells a similar story: private industry’s share of production rose from 22 to 24 percent in a single year, worth around Rs 42,000 crore, as firms ranging from Adani Defence to smaller MSMEs enter a supply chain once dominated entirely by public-sector undertakings.

The cumulative effect shows up in India’s climb to 38th place in the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s Global Innovation Index in 2025, up from 81st a decade earlier —- one of the longest-running “innovation overperformers” relative to its income level, in WIPO’s own description. For an economy still classified as lower-middle-income, that ranking, paired with record defence exports and a functioning private launch industry, lends some empirical weight to the government’s argument that India is moving from consuming imported technology toward producing and exporting it - with implications for high-skill employment, foreign investment in strategic sectors, and India’s negotiating position in technology partnerships with the United States, Japan and the European Union.

The gaps that still need closing

The momentum, however, sits on uneven foundations. India’s gross expenditure on research and development has been stuck near 0.64 percent of GDP for nearly two decades, the Economic Survey 2025-26 noted — against roughly 2.4 percent in China, 3.5 percent in the United States and almost 5 percent in South Korea. The shortfall is structural, not just financial: private industry contributes only about 41 percent of India’s R&D spending, versus 75 to 79 percent in those three economies, and a large share of publicly funded research stalls in what the Survey calls the “valley of death” between laboratory prototype and market-ready product. A Rs 20,000-crore Research, Development and Innovation fund announced in this year’s budget is meant to address that gap, but utilisation of comparable past allocations has historically lagged well behind the money made available.

Other constraints are more familiar: slow-moving defence and space procurement cycles, uneven protection and commercialisation of intellectual property, a shortage of manufacturing-grade engineering talent even as design talent grows, and continued dependence on imported components — jet engines,

lithography equipment, high-end GPUs - for the most demanding systems. Sustaining the present momentum will need deeper private R&D participation, faster disbursal of already-committed funds, procurement pipelines steady enough to justify industrial investment, and a deliberate push up the value chain from assembly and packaging toward design and fabrication.

This hydrogen train has 3200 horsepower, and India’s hydrogen train is also the longest. The hydrogen trains currently operating around the world have only 3 or 4 coaches. And for the first time, India has made its mark on the world by operating a hydrogen train with 10 coaches — Prime Minister Narendra Modi

R&D

India’s biggest strengths

• Space technology has become India’s flagship scientific success, combining high reliability with low-cost innovation.
• Affordable engineering allows India to achieve globally competitive outcomes at significantly lower costs.
• Digital public infrastructure, AI deployment and biotechnology provide strong foundations for future innovation.

Areas where India still lags

• Advanced semiconductor fabrication (sub-5 nm chips).
• Frontier AI foundation models comparable to those from the US and China.
• Nobel Prize-level basic scientific research and R&D intensity.
• Commercialisation of university research and deep-tech startups at the scale seen in the US.
• Overall R&D spending remains around 0.7 per cent of GDP, well below countries such as South Korea and the US, limiting the pace of scientific breakthroughs.

India climbed to 38th place in the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s Global Innovation Index in 2025

India’s Most Significant Scientific & Technological Achievements (2021-2026)

Space Exploration

Chandrayaan-3 soft landing near the Moon’s south pole (2023): India became the first nation to land near the lunar south pole, opening new possibilities for future lunar exploration and resource studies.

Lunar landing nations: US, USSR/Russia, China, India and first at the south pole.

Solar Science

Aditya-L1 Solar Observatory (2023): India’s first dedicated solar mission is studying solar winds, coronal heating and space weather that affect satellites and communication systems.

India is one of the few countries operating a dedicated solar observatory in space.

Commercial Space

Skyroot’s Vikram-1 (2026): India’s first privately developed orbital rocket reached orbit, marking the arrival of an indigenous commercial launch industry and validating space-sector reforms.

India has joined a very small group of countries with successful private orbital launch capability.

Semiconductors

Indigenous space processors and NavIC chips: Development of the Vikram processor, indigenous ASICs and Gallium Nitride technologies reduces dependence on imports in strategic electronics.

India is rapidly strengthening chip design and strategic semiconductor capabilities.

Artificial Intelligence

IndiaAI Mission and sovereign AI infrastructure: India has invested in public AI compute, multilingual foundation models and AI applications in healthcare, agriculture and governance.

India is fast emerging as one of the top five AI ecosystems by talent and scale.

Green Transportation

India’s first indigenous hydrogen-powered train (2026): Hydrogen fuel-cell rail technology offers a zero-emission alternative for non-electrified routes and supports India’s net-zero ambitions.

India joins a select group-including Germany, China and Japan-experimenting with hydrogen rail systems.

Quantum Technology

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) for secure communications: DRDO’s successful field trials of indigenous QKD strengthen cybersecurity for defence and critical infrastructure.

India is among fewer than 20 countries actively developing operational quantum communication technologies.

Biotechnology & Vaccines

COVID-19 vaccines and biotechnology ecosystem: India developed indigenous vaccines, supplied doses globally and expanded biotechnology manufacturing and genomic capabilities.

India is one of the world’s largest vaccine manufacturers and a major global biotechnology hub.