Raman

How India Can Seize Technology Leadership: Dr. Mashelkar’s Blueprint India’s top scientist who ignited Mukesh Ambani’s Jio ambitions shares eye-opening INSIGHTS on India’s technology potential and what is stopping India:. Poverty Provokes Innovation a. Padma Vibhushan Raghunath Mashelkar transformed India’s premier scientific organizations CSIR and NPL. Mukesh Ambani waited for him to retire, and then asked him to create Reliance Innovation Council with Nobel Laureates and global academics. b. When Jio was just an idea, Mukesh Ambani remarked: “Doc, we must leapfrog.” Dr. Mashelkar replied: “Mukesh, do you know why does a frog leap? Because it is afraid of the predator. So, it jumps a few feet. You don’t have to jump a few feet. You must pole vault. That involves risk.” Jio became one of the largest corporate bets in history with the untested 4G LTE technology. c. In Dec 2025, Mukesh Ambani spoke in his honour at an event: Dr. Mashelkar was brought up by his widowed mother in a chawl in utter poverty. His mother was refused a daily-wage job because the minimum qualification was third standard. That’s when she vowed her son would receive the highest education in the world. How India Can Pole Vault a. India’s Weakness: “Indian industry has never come forward to invest in R&D. Bulk of R&D work in India remains confined to Technology Readiness Level TRL 1 to 4 (laboratory level). Why? Because TRL 5 to 7 requires long-horizon risk capital. (TRL 9 is commercial). That is missing in India,” says Dr. Mashelkar. b. India’s Strength: “India’s talent is its strength. See how Indians perform in Silicon Valley. When legendary GE CEO Jack Welch set up the Jack Welch R&D Center in Bangalore 25 yrs ago, he was asked why are you here? He replied: “Because I get the highest intellectual capital per dollar in India.” c. Until 1989, India had zero international patents. In 1989, Dr. Mashelkar took over as director of National Chemical Laboratory (NCL). Within 3 hours of joining, he made a daring claim to the NCL team of 1,100 (note: just like Elon Musk does): “India will license patents to the rest of the world.” d. “We had zero culture of patenting, and here I was telling the NCL community we will license our technology to multi-billion global chemical giants like DuPont and Dow Chemical. Why was I doing that? Because I knew that the NCL scientists sitting in that auditorium had world-class talent.” e. A young scientist approached me after the lecture and said: “Do you know GE’s R&D budget is 2.5 times entire India’s R&D budget?” I told him what matters is the power of an idea and mindset. We will change the rules of the game. f. We had no budget, no imported equipment, no industrial ecosystem. But we could do mathematical modeling and simulation end-to-end in the lab. That required only talent. We aimed for a new breakthrough in polycarbonate, where GE was the leader with 40% world market share. g. My team said: “If this technology was doable, GE would have done it.” In India whenever you talk of cutting-edge technology, the industry asks: “Has the US done it? Has Japan done it? So how can we do it?” Tech innovators in US & China don’t ask this question. They don’t care what others have done or not done. h. “You know what? We got the global patent. GE R&D in the US was surprised that some crazy lab in Chennai had beaten them. They sent down a team. When they saw our talent, they said we will partner with you. That’s how the Jack Welch R&D Center came up.” i. Rising to Your Potential: The same people at NCL who were just copying others, were able to achieve international patents. From import substitution, we became an export-oriented lab in one year. All that had changed was the mindset. It became a case study at Harvard Business School. “Every individual has a Mukesh Ambani in them. It’s just a question of rising to your potential," says Dr. Mashelkar. 5 Ways to Become a Tech Powerhouse a. Dr. Mashelkar’s 5-Pillar Framework: The 1st way is you invent a new technology. The 2nd way is you buy a technology (strategic acquisition). The 3rd way is: “Buy to Make Better.” It means you buy with an intention to make cheaper & better yourself. China does that using iterative R&D (reverse engineering). b. 4th Way: “Make to Buy Better”: India needed AOS chemical technology. We went to Arimitsu, then Chevron, then Shell. All refused. They viewed us as a potential competitor. So, we decided to make it ourselves. We reached pilot plant stage (TRL 4). At that point, finance dept turned us down. c. A competitor told me: “We were keeping a watch on you. If you had gone for the pilot plant, we would have given you the technology. Because we knew you will become our competitors.” That is called “Make to Buy Better.” When you want to shake hand with someone, they will look at the strength of your hand. d. 5th Way: “Make it Together”: When I was heading CSIR in 2000, the Finance Minister called me and said he wanted to give something to scientists in the first budget of the new millennium. “Give me an idea in 30 minutes.” e. I wrote my idea: “Indian industry is behind the curve due to no risk-taking. So, let govt take the risk and give money to pvt sector.” FM granted ₹50 cr. It was a big amount in 2000 just for “gambling” in risky technologies. Govt doing that was unheard of. f. It worked because Ministry of Science, Planning Commission, and Bureaucracy were all bypassed. We formed a public-private initiative with ₹50 cr seed money. Our first product was a cutting-edge bioinformatics software. TCS and 19 Indian genomics labs worked in sync like an orchestra. g. In 18 months, our software product BioSuit was launched in Silicon Valley, and proved 10x better & cheaper than best-in-class. “By the time I retired in 2006, we had 250 public institutions and 100 private companies working together on new technologies.” h. Govt Has to Have Ambition: China has refused Lithium-Ion battery tech to India. KPIT has created its own sodium-ion battery. It is at TRL-7 now. To reach TRL-9 (commercial), it needs govt’s backing. (Just the way China supported BYD & others.) i. Technologies that make the world bend before you don’t emerge from playing it safe. Chasing moonshot ideas (like US/China innovators) requires a culture where failure is celebrated. Chandrayaan-3 succeeded because Chandrayaan-2 failed. Every mistake of Chandrayaan-2 was identified and not repeated. Endpiece: Convex Lens Leadership At his municipal school, Dr. Mashelkar’s physics teacher Principal Bhave gave a demo of convex lens under the sun. He then turned and said: “Mashelkar, if you concentrate your energies like this and not diffuse (waste) them, you can burn the world.” Dr. Mashelkar says: “India needs convex lens leadership today.”