India bet its research future on private money: inside the Anusandhan National Research Foundation

India has long had a research-funding problem that everyone could name and few could fix: too little money, too concentrated in a handful of elite institutes, and too dependent on the government to supply it. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation is the state’s answer, and it is an unusual one. Rather than promise more public money, it is built to pull most of its funding from outside government altogether.

Created by the ANRF Act 2023, the foundation is meant to seed and grow research across the country’s universities and colleges, not only its national laboratories. In doing so it absorbed the older Science and Engineering Research Board and took on the role of India’s apex research funder, under the Department of Science and Technology .

Why does the funding model matter more than the money?

The headline figure is large, but the structure is the real story. Roughly 70% of the corpus is meant to come from industry and philanthropy, not the exchequer. That is a deliberate departure from how Indian science has been financed, and it is both the foundation’s central bet and its central risk.

Anusandhan National Research Foundation

The Anusandhan National Research Foundation is India’s apex research funding body, established by the ANRF Act 2023 to set strategic direction and fund research across universities, colleges and laboratories. Its distinguishing feature is a funding model that expects most of its ₹50,000 crore corpus to come from private and philanthropic sources rather than government.

If the private money arrives at the scale planned, ANRF multiplies the state’s research spend without a matching rise in the budget. If it does not, the foundation is left far short of its target, and the promise of research funding reaching ordinary universities weakens.

What problem is ANRF trying to solve?

The case for change rests on a stark number. India spends roughly 0.6% of GDP on research and development, below the global average of about 1.8% and below the levels of countries it competes with on technology. Worse, the private sector’s share of that spending has historically been low, leaving the government to carry most of the burden.

ANRF attacks both problems at once. It aims to raise the total, and it aims to shift the mix toward private funding, closer to how research is financed in more research-intensive economies. The design assumes that Indian industry and philanthropy will fund research if given a national vehicle to do it through.

Can the money reach ordinary universities?

The foundation’s stated ambition is to fund research beyond the elite institutes, in the state universities and colleges where most Indian students study but little research money currently flows. That is where the framework could matter most, and where it will be hardest to deliver.

Directing competitive grants to institutions with thin research infrastructure requires more than a corpus. It needs review capacity, mentoring, and a tolerance for building research cultures slowly. The interim 2024-25 budget provided ₹2,000 crore as a start, a signal of intent rather than the full scale the model envisions.

Governance and accountability

The ANRF’s governance structure places the Prime Minister as ex-officio President of its Board, with Union Ministers as vice-presidents. That design signals political importance, but it also raises questions about operational independence. Research funding bodies usually benefit from some distance from day-to-day political cycles if they are to fund long-term, high-risk projects. The ANRF will need to demonstrate that its grants decisions are made on merit rather than political convenience if it is to attract serious proposals from universities outside the elite circle.

Transparency mechanisms will be critical. The foundation should publish grant outcomes, success rates by institution type, and funder-side learnings on an annual basis. Without that data, it will be impossible to judge whether the money is reaching ordinary universities or concentrating in a small set of familiar institutions.

How other countries have tried similar models

Research foundations that rely heavily on non-government funding are not unique to India. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the United States, the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom, and the Max Planck Society in Germany all blend public and private support, but they developed over decades rather than under a five-year target. Their experience suggests that corpus-building is a long game, and that early years often produce administrative overhead before they produce research outcomes.

India’s advantage is its younger population and growing private-sector interest in research. Its disadvantage is the compressed timeline. The ANRF is expected to show results within a few years, while comparable institutions took generations to reach scale. That mismatch creates pressure to declare success before the model has actually been tested.

What this means for early-career researchers

For PhD scholars and postdocs, the ANRF’s success or failure is not abstract. If the foundation funds more grants at ordinary universities, it creates more supervised research slots, more publication opportunities, and more pathways into academic and industry careers. If it fails to disburse or concentrates funding in elite institutes, the queue of underemployed researchers will keep growing.

Early-career researchers should therefore watch the ANRF’s first grant calls closely. The eligibility criteria, review timelines, and distribution of awards will reveal whether the foundation is serious about broadening access or simply managing headline numbers. Their own career planning should account for the possibility that state-university research funding improves only slowly, if at all.

What success would look like

A successful ANRF would be measured less by the headline corpus than by distribution: how many state universities received grants, how many PhD scholars completed with ANRF support, and how many papers or patents emerged from ordinary institutions rather than national laboratories. Those metrics would show whether the foundation is truly broadening India’s research base or simply rebranding existing elite funding.

The real test is whether the ANRF changes the behaviour of funders beyond its own grants. If it creates a culture of competitive, merit-based research funding in universities that have never experienced it, that legacy would outlast any single corpus cycle. If it instead becomes another source of fragmented grants with weak follow-through, it will join the long list of well-intentioned Indian research policies that did not change the distribution of opportunity.

Why private funding alone is not enough

The ANRF’s model assumes that Indian industry and philanthropy will step in where government funding has not. That assumption deserves scrutiny. Private-sector research funding tends to follow applied, commercially promising fields—artificial intelligence, semiconductors, renewable energy—rather than basic research in the social sciences, humanities, or pure mathematics. If the ANRF’s corpus depends on voluntary corporate contributions, the research agenda may skew toward short-term commercial interests rather than the long-term knowledge base that a national research foundation is supposed to support.

Philanthropic funding carries a similar bias. Indian philanthropy in education has historically favoured visibility projects—new buildings, scholarships, named centres—over the repetitive, unglamorous work of sustaining research cultures. The ANRF will need guardrails that protect basic-research funding from being crowded out by donor preferences, or it risks becoming a conduit for private interests rather than a public good.

Conclusion

The Anusandhan National Research Foundation is an attempt to fix India’s research-funding gap by changing who pays for research, not just how much is spent. Its ₹50,000 crore target and its reliance on private money make it ambitious and fragile in the same measure. Whether it becomes the engine its design promises depends on a question outside any statute: whether Indian industry and philanthropy fund basic research at the scale the country now needs.