On the surface, India is not an innovation economy. We have too few patents for a country of our size and very few globally path-breaking products have been invented here. We lack a tradition of people starting businesses which go on to undermine the business models of big companies, and we haven’t invented many new industries (with the notable exception of information technology or IT Services). Even the current e-commerce wave is a derivative of what has happened in the West, and in some ways has significantly lagged behind other parts of the world.
Image: The Mangalyaan mission used home-grown technologies to successfully send an operational spacecraft to Mars, on its very first attempt, on a budget of $74 million—less than what it costs to produce many Hollywood movies. Photo: ISRO/AFP
