The extraordinary success of India’s biggest corporate groups has come not from technological daring, but from mastering scale, regulation, and timing. Telecom spectrum, ports, airports, power distribution, mining rights, highways, software services—these are domains where profits are driven by access and execution, not original intellectual property
Chinese universities have turned the registration of world-class patents—across both military and civilian domains—into an institutional habit. This is not accidental, nor is it decorative. It reflects a civilisational clarity about power, technology, and sovereignty. Knowledge is not treated as a seminar topic or a CSR talking point; it is treated as infrastructure. In sharp contrast, India’s largest corporate houses—beneficiaries of market dominance, cheap labour, regulatory arbitrage, and state-enabled scale—have largely avoided investing in genuinely game-changing technological intellectual property. The result is a country that consumes advanced technology at scale but produces very little of it at the frontier.
The divergence between China and India is not about intelligence, talent, or even capital availability. It is about intent, risk appetite, and the willingness to play a long, uncertain game. Chinese universities file patents not as academic trophies but as strategic assets, often linked directly to defence applications that later spill into civilian use. Indian corporations, by contrast, prefer predictable returns from rent-seeking models—telecom licenses, infrastructure concessions, IT services, commodity extraction—rather than the slow, capital-intensive, and failure-prone business of deep technology creation.
Universities as engines of state power in China
In China, universities are not ivory towers. They are embedded within a national project. Major Chinese institutions—Tsinghua, Beihang, Harbin Institute of Technology, Northwestern Polytechnical University—operate at the intersection of military research, civil manufacturing, and applied engineering. Patents are aggressively filed, often in bulk, and frequently in dual-use domains such as materials science, propulsion, electronics, AI, quantum communication, and energy storage.
What matters is not merely the volume of patents, but their orientation. These patents are not designed to be licensed for marginal revenue; they are designed to anchor domestic supply chains, deny technological chokepoints to adversaries, and create leverage in future negotiations. A radar algorithm today becomes a civilian navigation system tomorrow. A missile guidance breakthrough quietly evolves into autonomous vehicle control software. This translation is systematic, institutionalised, and expected.
Crucially, Chinese universities do not operate in isolation. They are plugged into state-owned enterprises, defence contractors, and increasingly sophisticated private firms. The boundary between “academic research” and “industrial application” is deliberately porous. Failure is tolerated because the state understands that technological sovereignty is built on iteration, not perfection.
India’s corporate rent-seeking comfort zone
India’s biggest corporate groups and the large IT services firms—occupy a very different mental universe. Their extraordinary success has come not from technological daring, but from mastering scale, regulation, and timing. Telecom spectrum, ports, airports, power distribution, mining rights, highways, software services—these are domains where profits are driven by access and execution, not original intellectual property.
This model is not immoral; it is simply incomplete. The problem arises when this rent-seeking comfort becomes a substitute for ambition. When companies with balance sheets larger than the GDPs of small countries hesitate to invest in uncertain, long-horizon research, the nation pays a strategic price. India ends up importing core technologies while exporting finished-market demand.
The reluctance to invest in foundational IP is often justified with familiar arguments: “India does not have an ecosystem,” “returns are uncertain,” “global technology moves too fast,” or “it is cheaper to buy than to build.” These arguments sound pragmatic, but they conceal a deeper lack of belief—belief in domestic scientific capability and belief in the state’s willingness to back failure.
The Reliance–Hithium episode and the limits of assembly
Reliance Industries’ decision to call off its electric vehicle battery foray is a textbook example of India’s technological dilemma. The plan collapsed because Hithium, the Chinese battery company, refused to transfer core technology. What remained on offer was assembly, not knowledge. When the technology tap was turned off, the project ceased to make sense.
This episode reveals a brutal truth. India’s industrial strategy often assumes that technology will eventually be “shared” if enough capital is deployed or enough market access is offered. China has long moved beyond this illusion. It understands that core technology is power and that power is not shared voluntarily. It is either built or denied.
Reliance did not walk away because batteries are unimportant; it walked away because without IP ownership, the venture would merely replicate India’s long-standing role as a high-volume, low-control manufacturing base. The tragedy is not the cancellation itself, but the absence of a credible domestic alternative—no parallel Indian consortium stepping in with a serious indigenous battery chemistry roadmap.
Rafale billions and the engine that never was
India’s willingness to spend $40–50 billion on the Rafale deal is often defended as a strategic necessity. Yet the same strategic imagination seems to evaporate when the discussion turns to building a world-class jet engine at home. The contradiction is striking. A country capable of designing cryogenic rocket engines through ISRO apparently lacks the confidence, belief, or political courage to demand a domestic military jet engine programme at scale.
Imagine, even hypothetically, a consortium of ISRO, DRDO, and a private engineering giant like L&T being mandated to build a next-generation turbofan engine. The risks would be enormous. Failures would be inevitable. Timelines would slip. Costs would balloon. But that is precisely how every major aerospace power learned.
Instead, India prefers licensed production, screwdriver assembly, and incremental “indigenisation” percentages that mask continued dependency on foreign cores. The result is an air force that flies advanced aircraft powered by engines it does not fully control. In wartime or diplomatic crisis, this dependence becomes vulnerability.
World War II: When the state took the long view
The technological dominance of the United States and the United Kingdom after World War II did not emerge from market magic. It emerged from deliberate, massive, and sustained state investment in research and development. During the war, governments did not ask whether projects would be profitable in five years. They asked whether they would work at all.
Radar, jet engines, nuclear reactors, advanced metallurgy, cryptography, computing, and aerospace design were all funded with public money. Private companies built prototypes using their own blueprints, but the financial risk was borne by the state. If a prototype succeeded, an order followed. If it failed, lessons were absorbed and the next iteration began.
This model created not only weapons, but entire industries. Military necessity accelerated innovation, but peace converted it into civilian prosperity. The spillovers were not accidental; they were structural.
From SR-71 to Silicon Valley
Consider the SR-71 Blackbird. Its materials science breakthroughs—especially in titanium alloys and thermal management—reshaped aerospace engineering. The computing and navigation challenges it posed pushed forward advances in electronics and systems integration. These capabilities did not remain locked inside the military-industrial complex; they flowed outward.
Similarly, the F-15 programme refined avionics, aerodynamics, and propulsion concepts that later informed civilian aviation. The P-51D Mustang and P-47 Thunderbolt were not just fighters; they were flying laboratories for high-performance engines, fuel systems, and manufacturing techniques.
The British experience was no different. Aircraft like the Canberra and experimental platforms like the Hovercraft were born from defence-driven R&D and later found civilian applications. The Hovercraft, initially explored for military mobility, became a symbol of innovative transport. These transitions were possible because governments funded risk and allowed private firms to fail forward.
The private sector’s role: Builder, not gambler
A crucial distinction is often missed in India’s debates. In the US and UK wartime model, private companies were not gamblers risking their own capital blindly. They were builders executing ambitious designs with state backing. The risk was socialised because the reward—technological sovereignty—was national.
India often demands that private firms shoulder both technological and financial risk while offering uncertain procurement guarantees. This is the worst of both worlds. Predictably, companies retreat to safer domains. True innovation ecosystems require credible state commitment: long-term funding, assured procurement, and tolerance for failure.
Without this, exhortations about “Atmanirbhar Bharat” remain slogans rather than strategies.
Why civilian technology follows military ambition
Military technology has historically been the fastest route to civilian breakthroughs because it pushes systems to extremes—speed, reliability, efficiency, resilience. Once those limits are conquered, civilian use becomes comparatively easy.
Jet engines enable commercial aviation. GPS, born from military navigation needs, underpins logistics and smartphones. The internet itself began as a defence communication experiment. Even modern AI owes much to defence-funded research in pattern recognition and decision systems.
China understands this lineage. That is why it treats military-civil fusion as doctrine, not buzzword. India, by contrast, treats defence procurement as a shopping exercise rather than an innovation engine.
The cost of timidity
India’s hesitation to invest deeply in technological IP has long-term consequences. It locks the country into perpetual catch-up. It weakens bargaining power. It drains foreign exchange. Most importantly, it limits strategic autonomy in moments that matter most.
Talent is not the problem. Indian engineers and scientists thrive globally when embedded in ecosystems that reward ambition. The problem is the absence of domestic structures that allow such ambition to mature at home.
What is missing is not money, but conviction.
Choosing between consumption and creation
India stands at a familiar crossroads. It can continue to be a vast market—assembled for, sold to, and technologically dependent—or it can choose the slower, harder path of creation. The Chinese university patent machine, the abandoned EV battery project, the imported jet engines, and the lessons of World War II all point in the same direction.
Technology is not bought; it is built. And it is built only when states and corporations decide that failure is an acceptable price for sovereignty. Until India’s corporate elite and political leadership internalise this truth, the gap between aspiration and capability will remain stubbornly wide. The question is no longer whether India can afford to invest in game-changing technological IP. The real question is whether it can afford not to.
Domestic private industry has finally begun to invest real capital, managerial attention, and manufacturing discipline into converting DRDO prototypes into production-ready weapon systems. Yet, when the moment comes for large, confidence-building orders from the Indian armed forces, the system hesitates, delays, or fragments procurement into token quantities. The result is an ecosystem that punishes initiative and rewards caution.
Bharat Forge’s work on the Advanced Towed Artillery Gun (ATAG) and Mounted Artillery Gun (MArG) is a case in point. The company invested heavily to transform DRDO’s designs into manufacturable, reliable artillery systems—solving issues of metallurgy, recoil management, mobility, and serial production. Despite this, the Indian Army has not placed orders commensurate with the effort or the strategic need. Ironically, Armenia, a country with a fraction of India’s defence budget and operational footprint, has inducted a meaningful number of these guns. For an Indian manufacturer, foreign validation has arrived faster than domestic confidence.
A similar pattern is visible in the case of the Wheeled Armoured Platform (WhAP). Tata Advanced Systems and Mahindra Defence put serious money into productionising the DRDO design, developing supply chains and manufacturing processes that did not previously exist in India. Yet, the Indian Army’s orders remain negligible. Morocco, on the other hand, has placed orders, prompting Tata to set up an assembly line there. Once again, Indian intellectual and industrial effort is being scaled abroad because domestic demand remains uncertain and episodic.
The Light Combat Aircraft Tejas tells the same story over a longer and more damaging timeline. Orders arrived in small batches—18, then another 18, then 4 more—spread over nearly a decade. This stop-start approach made it impossible for suppliers to plan for scale. The consequences were not abstract. In 2016, General Electric shut down the F404-IN20 engine assembly line due to lack of sustained orders. What should have been a steadily maturing aerospace supply chain instead became a lesson in how inconsistency erodes credibility.
L&T’s experience with the K9 Vajra self-propelled artillery system is equally revealing. After delivering the initial order of 100 guns on time, the company found its assembly line idle from 2018 to 2024 due to the absence of follow-up orders. Skilled workers, supplier networks, and production momentum were all left in limbo. This is not just inefficient; it is strategically self-defeating.
If established industrial giants face such uncertainty, the idea that startups will meaningfully participate in defence manufacturing becomes almost farcical. No startup can survive multi-year gaps between prototype success and production orders.
Across the border, the PLA operates on a fundamentally different philosophy. It inducts indigenous systems even when they meet only 60 percent of initial requirements. Operational deployment provides feedback, and iterative improvement follows. India, by contrast, demands near-perfection upfront—and then still hesitates to order. The cost of this timidity is not just economic. It is the steady erosion of India’s ability to build and sustain a credible, self-reliant defence industrial base.
