Private investment in research: When physicist Jainendra Jain received a call from Abhishek Lodha asking him to head a new theoretical physics institute in Mumbai, the proposition was unusual for India. Jain, a co-recipient of the 2025 Wolf Prize in Physics and a professor at Pennsylvania State University, was being asked to lead an institution financed entirely by private philanthropy. The Lodha Theoretical Physics Institute, launched in May 2026, is the first fully privately funded physics institute in India. The Lodha Foundation has committed $100 million over eight to 10 years.
The significance lies less in the size of the cheque than in what the money is expected to buy: time. Research in India is often constrained by publication-linked career incentives, short grant cycles, teaching loads and administrative work. These pressures make it harder to pursue questions that may take years to answer or end in failure. Much of India’s best science is still done in publicly funded institutions, where researchers also work within rules that were not designed around long-horizon inquiry.
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Universities that produce original research make room for uncertainty. A difficult new question may yield nothing. An incremental paper is easier to plan, publish and count. Promotion systems consequently make intellectual risk expensive even when the talent exists.
Private investment in research needs a different model
India has precedents for private philanthropy in science. Tata philanthropy helped establish the Indian Institute of Science and later the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. What became uncommon was philanthropy on a scale large enough to build institutions around fundamental research rather than fund individual projects.
LTPI revives that tradition. Its model resembles the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, an independent institution where scholars pursue research without teaching or routine administrative obligations. If a scientist is recruited to work on a difficult problem, the institution should not consume the time it has paid to protect.
Private funding can sometimes do what government spending in research finds harder to accommodate. A philanthropist can design an institution around a narrow purpose, finance it for a long period and resist pressure to extract a commercial result from each project.
The latest Department of Science and Technology figures show that private industry now finances about 45% of national R&D expenditure, while government accounts for about 48%. The private share is no longer as small as older comparisons suggested. Yet India’s total R&D expenditure remains around 0.64% of GDP, far below that of the major research economies. The gap concerns the scale and character of spending as much as its source.
Corporate R&D will naturally concentrate on products, processes and technologies that can earn a return. Philanthropic capital has another job. It can finance questions for which there is no visible market and no predictable timetable. These are different forms of private investment.
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The value of ‘useless’ knowledge
Fundamental research is vulnerable to the objection that it produces no immediate material return. That is often true. It also explains why such research is difficult to finance through normal corporate budgets.
The economic case rests on the peculiar nature of knowledge. Paul Romer’s work on endogenous growth showed why ideas differ from physical inputs. A machine can usually be used by one producer at a time. An idea can be used repeatedly without being exhausted. Once knowledge enters the public domain, firms and researchers can build on it at very low additional cost.
Joel Mokyr makes a related distinction between propositional knowledge, which explains what and why, and prescriptive knowledge, which explains how. Fundamental science expands the first category. Industry converts parts of it into the second through technologies, production methods and products. The path is rarely direct, and the time lag can be long.
India’s position in high-value research will not improve if every laboratory is asked to show an early commercial payoff. Pharmaceuticals, computing and materials science depend on bodies of knowledge accumulated before profitable applications were obvious. A country that imports most of that knowledge can still grow. It is less likely to own the intellectual foundations of the next generation of industries.
Privately funded institutes can help if they preserve the public character of fundamental knowledge. Researchers should be free to publish, recruit internationally and accept failure. Work should be judged by its contribution to a field rather than by annual publication counts. Private ownership of an institution should not become private ownership of every idea produced inside it.
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India needs patient private capital for science
Greater private investment in research requires more than asking companies to raise their R&D budgets. India also needs philanthropists willing to finance institutions whose output cannot be measured quarter by quarter.
Public science will remain central. Government is still the largest single funder of Indian R&D and will continue to support laboratories, universities and strategic research at a scale philanthropy cannot match. Private institutions can create smaller spaces in which researchers are protected from incentives that favour safe, incremental work.
The Lodha experiment will matter if such freedom can be institutionalised rather than reserved for a few eminent scientists. India has researchers capable of asking difficult questions. More institutions need to give them the time to pursue the answers.
Rewanth Raichooti is a Research Associate, and Sri Sriyaa Suribhatla is a Research Intern at the Council for Social Development, Hyderabad.