New Delhi, July 3 -- In the final budget for 2024-25, the government had announced a scheme with a corpus of Rs.1 trillion to promote research, development and innovation (RDI) in India's private sector. Almost a year later, the Centre has unveiled a broad outline for this programme. Sure, it is better than nothing, but, as it stands, it seems unlikely to ignite much innovative passion.

Given the dismal track record of our private companies on R&D-as a nation we spend less on it than what Amazon does in a year and only 37% of that sum is by private entities-we need a whole lot more than the offers of cheap finance that this RDI scheme proposes to make. Large established businesses are turning their attention to such exciting sectors as p...