Since independence, India has used science and technology as the foundation for its development. It has been successful. India is one of only seven countries to have attempted a mission to Mars and the only one to succeed at the first attempt. After successfully inserting Aditya L1, its first space-based observatory mission to study the Sun, India aims to send astronauts into low earth orbit in 2025, with the long-term aim of a sustained Indian human space exploration programme. The roll out of India’s digital public infrastructure has improved the lives of its citizens in myriad ways. In addition, several national missions in the fields of Quantum computing, artificial intelligence, biodiversity, electric vehicles, waste to wealth, deep ocean exploration and hydrogen have either been launched or approved. Today, India has a well-recognised research set-up, with which the most dynamic countries in the domain wish to collaborate on an equal footing and on the basis of true partnerships.

The establishment of Swissnex in India in Bengaluru in 2010 was an acknowledgment that India is an innovation hotspot where Switzerland had to engage. The Indo-Swiss Innovation Platform launched in October 2023 aims to give the Indo-Swiss collaboration a more strategic and systemic dimension, moving beyond ad hoc-only collaborations, while maintaining the bottom-up approach that is characteristic of Swiss research and innovation. The conditions are now ripe to take the cooperation from isolated engagements of individual researchers to a more a strategic level. In the meetings that State Secretary Hirayama and her delegation had in India in March 2024, she discovered a new India, assertive and confident in itself and its capabilities, and ready to engage with the world on equal terms. It is not something we would have heard even a few years ago and the call to make the partnership more strategic was repeated at every meeting, be it with the Government, or with industry and academia.

Ways to make the cooperation more strategic are now being conceptualised, both in Switzerland, and consultation with Indian stakeholders, especially in the Government, whose buy-in will be key for success. While it is too soon to provide details at this time, in the next two years we hope that the foundations of a much closer cooperation, sustainable and looking at shared issues on a longer horizon than a single project will have been laid. Swissnex in India and the Science Counselor in India are working towards that objective.

India has the ambition to be a world leader in research and innovation and is putting the means to become one. While expenditure on research and development at the federal level (two thirds of all expenditure, mainly invested in public research and development institutes and universities) has remained flat over time, an expanding GDP (estimated at 6.7% in 2024) means that the absolute amount of funding available for research and development is growing. Indian companies have also started investing in research and development (22 in the 2023 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard). Over 1200 multinational companies have set up captive R&D centres in India, investing about 1.25% of GDP. India boasts of the third largest tech start-up ecosystem in the world. All this has resulted in India improving its ranking in the Global Innovation Index considerably in the past decade (from #73 in 2014 to #40 in 2023).

Engaging with this ecosystem will contribute towards the network’s overall goal of #ConnectingTomorrow.