Nataraj's claim is that India's thin corporate R&D is a policy artefact, not a national temperament. Capital was scarce at independence, so the state took the funding role and handed private manufacturers licences instead — and in a seller's market where you waited three years for a car, a licence was a better moat than any laboratory. He puts big industry's share of national R&D at well under twenty per cent, with pharma the standing exception, and offers a counter-example he lived inside: Hindustan Lever's outgoing British chairman predicted in the 1950s that India would flip from vegetable-oil exporter to importer by the mid-sixties, was right to within thirty days, and got a research centre built in Andheri that upgraded rice bran, karanja, sal, kusum and neem — oils previously burnt only for light — into soap. Instruments could not be imported, so the lab built its own gas chromatographs; one ended up at IISc, where Nataraj used it as a PhD student in 1972. Seventy-five years on, that stack of processes still leaves Hindustan Lever the country's number-one soap maker, while the licence-holders were washed out by liberalisation. Gurumurthy's half of the argument is institutional: CSIR was designed as exactly the translation agency India needed and the country blew it, academia is scored on publications while industry is scored on getting a product out the door, and India has only ever received technology shrink-wrapped, so nobody learned to do product development from first principles. Both land in the same place — the deep science startup as the de-risking layer, funded the way microwave valley was, by a government that stops pretending the West did it alone.
Worth your time if you are
Deep science founders stuck between an incubator and an industry contract
Corporate R&D heads who have only ever bought technology shrink-wrapped
Policy people who believe Silicon Valley funded itself
Academics now told to name an industry partner on every grant
