Innovation is key: Why does India's private sector not spend more on R&D?

The one most important reason on why firms may or may not undertake R&D is not government incentives but the absence of competitive forces

There is a general agreement in India, almost a consensus, that the country needs to undertake greater research & development (R&D) to progress faster and more effectively. While this is the objective, most also agree that India’s expenditure on R&D is quite low. The oft-repeated statistic (sourced from the World Bank, which aggregates national data) shows that compared to countries such as Taiwan (3.6 per cent), South Korea (4.8 per cent), China (2.4 per cent), and even Brazil (1.2 per cent), India’s spend on R&D as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) is barely 0.65 per