India’s global position rises both in innovations & publications
29 January 2021: India features among the top 50 innovative economies globally as per the Global Innovation Index (GII), placing it ahead of many developed and developing countries. While the country has already attained the third position in terms of publications, India’s excellence in science has now been combined with the recognition of its brilliance as an innovative economy. This has been possible through encouraging investments in scientific activities, infrastructure as well as manpower development along with boosting of the entire innovation chain in an environment charged with the start-up India movement.
According to Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology (DST), India’s national investment in R&D has increased from Rs.1,13,825.03 crore in 2017-18 to Rs.1,23,847.71 crore in 2018-19. The implementation of NIDHI has nurtured 3681 startups under incubation through the network of around 150 Incubators created by DST, generated 1992 intellectual property. Further, in the last five years, jobs generated in the form of direct employment were 65,864 and Rs.27,262 crores of economic wealth.
Among the 13,045 patents sealed in the year 2017-18, 1,937 patents were by Indians. However, some states held the lion’s share of patents filed. Out of 15,550 patents filed by Indians at Indian Patent Office during 2017-18, 65% were filed from the States of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Delhi.
According to data from the US agency, the National Science Foundation (NSF), India is currently in third place, only behind China and the United States, with 135,788 scientific articles in the year 2018. India recorded the fastest average annual growth rate of publications between 2008 and 2018 with 10.73 percent. In comparison, the average annual growth rate of China and the United States are respectively 7.81 and 0.71 percent.
The breeding ground of this escalating scientific research lay in the country’s 993 Universities/Deemed Universities, 127 institutes of national importance, and 39,931 colleges across the length and breadth of the country.
