Startup Game: How IIT-Delhi is playing it and reaping the patents

The institute had research and development (R&D) grants of ₹500 crore for FY25, an amount that keeps growing, Banerjee said on the sidelines of releasing its first research impact report covering the past six years. “This helps our research build startups that generate direct employment, and leverage technology transfers from academia to compete in the industry,” he added.

For comparison, the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and IIT Madras had R&D grants of ₹626 crore and ₹681 crore respectively in FY24, as per their annual reports.

“The balance of research funding is tricky for Indian institutes compared with global ones. Here, most funding comes from the government—and these are competitive grants. Compared with previous years, the industry component of research funding is increasing, but its share is still relatively smaller,” said Banerjee, who heads the IIT ranked second among India’s best engineering colleges. Government initiatives such as the Anusandhan National Research Fund (ANRF) could help, Banerjee added. ANRF funds research projects and assists in setting up research infrastructure.

Among startups incubated by IIT-Delhi affordable internet startup Wiom and connected car infrastructure startup Vecmocon raised $17.1 million and $10 million respectively, Banerjee added.

Part of a growing base

Preeti Ranjan Panda, dean, corporate relations at IIT Delhi, said these are part of a growing base of successful private ventures building large companies through partnership funding from large corporations.

“We have a partnership with aviation giant Boeing for its ‘Build’ (Boeing University Innovation Leadership Development) programme, as well as pharmaceutical conglomerate Pfizer with the latter’s ‘Innovation and IP Programme’. Each of them helps startups like Wiom and Vecmocon create an industry network, and an ecosystem of support to build for the world,” Panda said.

Industry veterans have voiced the need for India to build its own intellectual properties in foundational technologies to reduce reliance on other nations. Last week, Ajai Chowdhry, co-founder, HCL and chairman of think-tank Epic Foundation told Mint that a lack of core patents “can leave India at the mercy of other nations, especially the US, and the sanctions that they can impose to force their will on our and the global technology supply chain.”

Meanwhile, 20 research students from IIT-Delhi are at Taiwan’s National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University to build chip fabrication skills.

“India already has a big base of chip design engineers, but fabrication is a skill that remains absent. This will be necessary to cater to India’s upcoming chip fabs. Our partnership with NYCU, Taiwan is in order to bring core chip fabrication skills to India, which will help India build greater value R&D in the semiconductor field,” said Naresh Bhatnagar, dean of research and development at IIT Delhi, who heads the project.

Steadily growing figure

Nikhil Agarwal, managing director of IIT-Delhi’s Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer said that in FY24, the institute was granted 190 patents, a figure he said is steadily growing.

Banerjee added that there are multiple factors that need to be taken into account before India’s R&D initiatives can build the kind of impetus that could rival the US.

“We will have to establish trust among investors and showcase the mutual benefit of R&D investments to those funding these efforts. The scaling of startups is a key challenge on this note—we’re trying to see how we can grow some of our R&D projects to have a very large impact. For that, we are trying to enhance the overall investment and marketplace ecosystems,” he said.

“The question now is how fast we can build scale (for startups to make R&D investments successful). Favourable regulatory and policy frameworks, of course, help. There are policies in place in India to maintain financial discipline, which is fine. But, in research, one also needs speed. There, it’s not just about buying a commodity versus a specialized equipment. We need to be able to do the latter, and there are some challenges left to be addressed there,” Banerjee further added.

ANRF, which Banerjee cited earlier, could be key on this note. With this programme, the Centre seeks to build a ₹50,000 crore ($5.8 billion) corpus to fund R&D initiatives in the country—with ₹14,000 crore ($1.6 billion) invested by the Centre, and the rest raised from donations and private sector participation.

Mint reported on 12 December that the Centre is working on a ₹30,000 crore ($3 billion) incentive programme for the electronics industry, of which a potential $1.2 billion could be earmarked to incentivize the private sector to spend more on R&D partnerships in India—such as Boeing and Pfizer’s partnerships with IIT Delhi.