Government Highlights Need for Companies to Step Up R&D Play

As India aspires to be the largest automobile market in the world and prepares for a transformative shift towards sustainable mobility, PMO Advisor Tarun Kapoor on Thursday called on India’s automobile industry to step up investments in research and development (R&D) and play a leadership role in innovation.

“R&D is a space where we have not been spending much. Most of the spending has come from the government. The industry has not been coming forward. The government now wants industry to partner with the government in R&D,” Kapoor said while speaking at the 65th Annual Convention of SIAM.

“On one side, we have our educational institutions, we have our government-owned R&D setup… On the other side, we have the industry which has to guide innovation and also, I would say, lead innovation,” he said.

Kapoor pointed to recent initiatives, including the establishment of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) and a ₹1 lakh crore fund aimed at helping research projects move from the laboratory to commercial scale.

Recently, the government approved the Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) scheme with a corpus of ₹1 lakh crore to catalyze private sector investment in research, development, and innovation, especially in sunrise and strategic sectors critical for national economic and technological advancement.

“This is the fund that comes in at TRL (technology readiness level) and takes the products to commercial scale. It has to be done with the industry. So this fund is only for the private sector, it is not for government institutions, and it is a huge fund… I request the industry to make use of this opportunity and get into innovation and R&D in a big way,” he added.