Chemical research: The building blocks of India's growth path

Nations that have a rich culture of research, invention and experimentation, are not necessarily the richest nations. Rather, they grow in wealth because they invest in research and innovation … and thus become inventive. Leaders in the study of chemistry, the ‘central science’, the Arab and Persian lands yielded their advantage to Greece, a poorer nation, which, ultimately, reaped the benefits of Arab-Persian scientific thought through its culture of debate, built largely on translations of studies from across the Arab-Persian world, India, China….
 
Throughout history, nations that have sponsored the growth of knowledge and debate have become the ‘forward-looking’ countries, each the most modern of its times. It is no coincidence that the European Renaissance gave way to the Industrial Revolution.
 
While the US has been the undisputed leader in scientific research for many decades, the balance has been shifting in recent times. Principally led by private investment, Asia has begun to reclaim its ownership of the scientific temper. For decades, Japanese, Korean and Indian scientists have made up a large proportion of scientists in the US, the country with the highest number of patent applications, the country that has benefited most from the best of Asian scientific talent.
 
Need to focus on research
In India, today, following the introduction of research-friendly policies - particularly the introduction of product patenting in 2005 - there has been significant increase in investment in research and development across industries … and, consequently, retention of the country’s scientific talent pool.
 
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Research has grown substantially in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and agriculture sectors.
 
The chemicals industry, despite being the principal carrier of the ‘central science’ not only for these sectors but for all the physical sciences, is lagging behind. Where, globally, the chemical industry spends an average four per cent of its revenues on research, in India the comparative figure is less than half a per cent. 
 
The Planning Commission of India, in its 2012-17 Five-Year Plan for the chemical industry, in addition to recommending several policy and other measures requiring government intervention, also blueprinted a proactive role for industry - principally in investments and innovation. While it recommended government incentives for the industry to participate in proposed ‘innovation parks’, it also said that the industry should expand its product portfolio and step up research and development (R&D) in each product group - paint and dyes, agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, etc.
 
It is thus encouraging that the chemicals industry is playing a key role in the reversal of the recent decline in new investments in India; a just-released study by Nomura found that new investment projects in the October-December quarter of 2013 is ‘led by new investments in the power and chemical and chemical product sectors’.
 
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But whether this will also mean increased investment in research is yet to be seen.
 
India’s pharmaceutical industry today spends around 18 per cent of its revenues on R&D; its 11 per cent compounded annual growth rate of the last decade, moreover, has principally been on the back of its research activities, shored by low costs and a high-talent human resource pool. Concurrently, India’s clinical research industry is growing at over 20 per cent per annum. Biotechnology innovations went from zero in the 1990s to five by 2008, while new pesticide registrations rose from 104 in 1980-1989 to 228 during the decade ended 2010. Similar growth in innovations is also seen in veterinary medicine and agricultural processing industries.
 
Still a long way to go…
While chemistry is at the heart of these researches, it is yet to sufficiently come into its own in India. As the Planning Commission document points out, the number of industry patent applications filed in India are one-tenth the number filed in China and one-fifteenth the number filed in the US; less than 25% of companies in India have R&D centres - against 40% in China and 60% in the US.
 
And yet the potential is immense. Every year the universities offer 150,000 post-graduates in chemistry and many more graduates. Plans for a chemical sector council for innovation and a chemical innovation fund have been proposed. By mining these opportunities, industry-driven R&D would not only boost the fortunes of the chemical industry per se but all the sectors that build on chemistry - not only pharmaceuticals and agriculture inputs such as fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides, adhesives and polymers … but also cold chains for storing food, various textiles, heating and cooling systems, catalytic conversions to treat waste. Among the most dramatic areas of frontier research in which chemists are engaged is the continuous search for better materials - stronger, harder, with longer life, less damaging to the environment in the manufacturing process and in disposal.
 
Innovating for future
Looking to the future, frontier technologies such as stem cell therapy, ‘green’ alternatives to waste management, the search for a vaccine against HIV, the nano structure of materials, the search for life and viable environments on other planets … are all, in the ultimate analysis, dependent on research in chemistry.
 
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Thus, growth of the chemical industry is a clear marker of overall industrial development just as the automobile industry has been a marker for development in the engineering industries. The significant differentiator is that chemistry is ubiquitous … it spans all industrial development, all agricultural activities, environment protection, health and healthcare … it anchors life itself.
 
Since the first experiments in chemical reaction resulted in the invention of making fire - thereby opening up our option to venture into colder lands, smelt ores into metals to hunt with, burn wild forests to replace these with cultivation, protect ourselves from predators, cook food - the romance of life has been evidenced through chemistry!
 
The chemical industry, then, could well serve to create the building blocks of India’s progress. 
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The author is the President, CEO & Chairman of Dow Chemical International Pvt Ltd and
APAC Regional Director, Functional Materials