Can ANRF deliver?

If it wants to kick-start innovation, the Anusandhan National Research Foundation should function on the lines of DARPA and not become just another funding mechanism

There’s a story researchers in India’s government labs tell with a rueful smile. A scientist receives a grant to build a prototype of an advanced agricultural sensor.

By the time procurement approves equipment, vendors quote, purchase orders clear seven approval layers, equipment clears customs and installation completes, 18 months pass. The cutting-edge technology is now on Amazon. The scientist publishes a paper. The prototype gathers dust. Everyone ticks boxes showing the grant was “successfully utilised”. This is how India does research funding.

Now comes the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), with Rs 50,000 crore and sky-high ambitions. The Prime Minister chairs its governing board. The comparisons to the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the US are explicit. But what makes anyone think ANRF will differ from the alphabet soup of research bodies — CSIR, DRDO, DBT, DST, SERB — that already exist?

India has, of course, impressive achievements. ISRO’s cost-effective satellites, DRDO’s strategic missiles, and vaccine manufacturing during Covid are some of the incredible examples. But R&D spending has been hovering around 0.7 per cent of the GDP for two decades. A CAG audit found that 119 of 178 DRDO high-priority projects had missed deadlines.

The Kaveri engine programme, which started in the 1990s, consumed massive resources and failed to produce a working engine. The Tejas aircraft finally flew with American engines.

ANRF’s composition is top-heavy with bureaucrats and politicians; it lacks experienced scientists and industry experts at operational levels. That’s why DARPA works — its 100-odd programme managers, on temporary assignment from academia and industry, have authority to make speedy decisions and kill failing projects without elaborate justification.

The DARPA model rests on three pillars opposite to Indian bureaucratic DNA: 1) extreme authority concentration in individual programme managers; 2) explicit celebration of failure as information; and 3) freedom from standard government rules. India has none of this institutionalised.

Consider the procurement problem. When DARPA needed autonomous vehicles, it announced the 2004 Grand Challenge — drive a robot car 150 miles through the Mojave Desert, with the winner pocketing $1 million. Every vehicle failed; the farthest got 7.4 miles before hitting a rock. In any Indian programme, this would trigger inquiries about wasteful expenditure.

DARPA refined the course and ran it again in 2005. Five vehicles finished. That event seeded the entire autonomous vehicle industry - Google’s self-driving cars, Tesla’s Autopilot, hundreds of billions in investment. The willingness to watch everything fail in year one and double down in year two is what breakthrough innovation looks like. It’s also what Indian audit mechanisms are designed to prevent.

Now, imagine an ANRF programme manager trying this approach. She identifies a critical problem. She wants to fund three competing teams. The traditional process requires publishing detailed RFPs, waiting for applications, constituting expert committees, scoring on pre-defined criteria, and defending selections. This takes a year at the minimum. But by then, the startup has pivoted, the professor moved institutions, and the company won a Singapore contract.

At DARPA, the programme manager calls the startup and says: “I have $2 million if you demonstrate a prototype in eighteen months.” The contract gets signed in weeks. No RFP, no committee, no competition. The programme manager’s judgment is trusted.

The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) has been brutally honest about this. ARIA programme managers operate with exemption from public procurement regulations – a technical detail that actually allows moving from idea to funded project in weeks rather than months.

For ANRF to get similar authority requires political will. The Ministry of Finance will resist exemptions from financial rules. The Central Vigilance Commission will worry about discretionary spending. Opposition parties will demand competitive bidding. Every concern is legitimate. And every one, if allowed to override the mission, turns ANRF into just another funding body.

India produces more STEM graduates than any country except China, yet has roughly 250 researchers per million people against 4,800 in the US and 5,400 in Germany. Indians run research departments at American universities, lead labs at Google and Microsoft, win Nobel Prizes after leaving. The problem is that research in India isn’t structured as an attractive career.

ANRF could change this by making programme manager a prestigious, well-compensated role - Rs 100 crore and three years to chase something important with complete autonomy. Let them hire globally, pay market rates, and offer equity participation. It means breaking government salary structures. Questions would be raised in Parliament, but it would be worth it.

Failure tolerance will encounter intense cultural resistance. Indian public life runs on negative accountability, in which fear of blame vastly exceeds reward for success. DARPA operates on the principle that if every project succeeds, the portfolio isn’t ambitious enough.

Therefore, to bring about any worthwhile change, ANRF requires statutory protection: “no civil or criminal proceedings shall lie against any programme manager for decisions made in good faith in furtherance of the Foundation’s objectives.” Without this, the first spectacular failure will teach every programme manager to fund safe things.

DARPA doesn’t operate through existing infrastructure; it finds the best people and ideas wherever they exist and funds directly. ANRF needs similar latitude. This will create resistance.

CSIR labs getting Rs 50 crore annually will surely have a problem with ANRF giving Rs 100 crore to startups. State governments will demand their respective shares. These are pressures that will pull toward redistribution rather than capability creation, which will need to be resisted.

If ANRF identifies five or six critical challenges — energy independence, water purification, advanced manufacturing — and organises programmes around those, it could matter. For instance, breakthroughs in grid-scale storage or ultra-low-cost solar could be transformative. These are moonshot-scale problems where failure is likely but success would matter enormously.

The alternative is clear. ANRF becomes another funding mechanism issuing calls for proposals, counting success in publications, and producing research that changes nothing fundamental. A decade later, people wonder why India’s R&D hasn’t transformed despite investment.

If ANRF starts radically and survives inevitable criticism when early programmes fail, it might become what India’s innovation ecosystem desperately needs.

(The writer is a research analyst in the High-Tech Geopolitics Programme at the Takshashila Institution)

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)