01 — Opening

The number that should interest you most

In January 2025, two Indian satellites named Chaser and Target found each other in low Earth orbit and locked together. Two months later they separated cleanly on the first attempt. With that, India became the fourth country — after the United States, Russia and China — to master autonomous orbital docking.

It is a good story. But if you advise technology companies on where innovation is created and protected, a less cinematic number matters more.

According to WIPO's World Intellectual Property Indicators 2025, patent applications filed worldwide by India-based applicants grew 19.1% in 2024 — the sixth consecutive year of double-digit growth, and the fastest among the top 20 origins. India now ranks sixth globally in patent filings. More telling: resident filings at the Indian patent office have risen from roughly 28% of applications a decade ago to about 60% today, the largest such shift in any major jurisdiction.

Translation: India has stopped being a place where foreign companies file defensively, and started being a place where inventions originate.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute's Critical Technology Tracker makes the same point from the research side. In its most recent update, India ranks in the global top five for research effort in 56 of 74 critical technologies — up from 50 in the previous edition — and now ranks second, ahead of the United States, in 16 of the technologies China leads.

What follows is what India actually built, where it genuinely stands against global peers, and what we think the next five years look like. We have tried to be useful rather than triumphant: the gaps are stated as plainly as the wins.

02 — Space

From lunar landings to a private orbital launch

Chandrayaan-3 soft-landed near the lunar south pole in August 2023 — a first for any nation, and India's entry into a club of four countries to land on the Moon at all. Aditya-L1 followed to the Sun–Earth L1 point. In July 2025, NISAR — a joint NASA–ISRO radar satellite and, at roughly $1.5 billion, the most expensive Earth observation satellite ever flown — launched on an Indian GSLV and now maps the planet's surface deformation every 12 days. Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla flew as pilot on Axiom-4 to the ISS, India's first human in orbit in 41 years.

1. Aug 2023Chandrayaan-3 — first soft landing near the lunar south pole.
2. Sep 2023 → Jan 2024Aditya-L1 — India's first solar observatory, inserted at L1.
3. Mar 2024Mission Divyastra — Agni-5 flight-tested with MIRV.
4. Jan → Mar 2025SpaDeX — orbital docking and undocking; fourth nation to do so.
5. Jun–Jul 2025Axiom-4 — first Indian aboard the ISS; 18 days, seven India-led experiments.
6. Jul 2025NISAR — launched on GSLV-F16; science phase from November 2025.
7. Sep 2025First Made-in-India chips — pilot-line silicon presented at SEMICON India.
8. Nov 2025NexCAR19 & quantum — humanised CAR-T, a 25-qubit QPU and a quantum security chip unveiled.
9. Jul 2026Vikram-1 reaches orbit — Skyroot becomes India's first private orbital launch, first attempt.

The structural change matters more than any single mission. India deregulated space in 2020 and created IN-SPACe as a single-window authoriser; the Indian Space Policy 2023 split ISRO (R&D), NSIL (commercial) and IN-SPACe (regulation); FDI rules were liberalised in 2024. The result: from a handful of private space firms in 2020 to over 300 registered commercial space entities today.

On 18 July 2026, Skyroot's Vikram-1 lifted off from Sriharikota and placed payloads into a 450 km orbit on its first attempt — making India the third country, after the US and China, with private orbital launch capability.

Where India stands: a proven, low-cost, high-reliability launch and deep-space operator with a fast-emerging private sector — holding roughly 2–3% of a global space economy it intends to take to 8%, from $8.4 billion to a targeted $44 billion by 2033.

03 — Defence

The export inflection

The numbers moved faster here than almost anywhere else. India's defence exports were ₹686 crore in FY2013-14. In FY2025-26 they reached ₹38,424 crore — a 62.7% jump over the previous year alone — with domestic defence production at a record ₹1.78 lakh crore. Import dependency for defence hardware has fallen from roughly 70% to around 45% over two decades.

On the technology itself: Mission Divyastra (March 2024) flight-tested Agni-5 with multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles, putting India in a group of six nations with MIRV capability; a second MIRV-equipped test followed in May 2026. In hypersonics, DRDO has run an actively cooled, full-scale scramjet combustor for over 1,200 seconds on an indigenously developed endothermic hydrocarbon fuel — the thermal-management problem that separates hypersonic ambition from hypersonic hardware. BrahMos is now exported to the Philippines (a ~$375 million contract), Vietnam and Indonesia, with Akash air-defence and Pinaka rocket artillery also finding buyers. iDEX has pulled more than 670 startups and MSMEs into the defence supply chain.

The gap that remains: jet engines and advanced submarine propulsion. India still imports the engines that power its own Tejas fighters, and defence R&D sits at roughly 5.5–6.5% of the defence budget.

04 — Semiconductors & electronics

From zero to first silicon in under four years

The India Semiconductor Mission launched in December 2021 with a ₹76,000 crore incentive framework offering up to 50% fiscal support. In September 2025, the first Made-in-India chips from a pilot line were formally presented at SEMICON India — roughly three and a half years from mission launch to physical silicon. Around 13 projects are now approved.

Table 1 — Approved facilities under the India Semiconductor Mission. Source: ISM, PIB, company disclosures.

The adjacent story is assembly. iPhone exports from India hit ₹2 lakh crore (~$22 billion) in FY26 — making Apple India's single largest branded export across all 5,000+ HS product categories, ahead of diesel, diamonds and medicines. India's share of global iPhone assembly is projected to reach roughly 28% in 2026. Assembly is not design, but the component localisation now underway is how assembly bases historically turn into design bases.

05 — Connectivity

The stack, and the rails

India built its own telecom stack

In 2025, a consortium of C-DOT (core network), Tejas Networks (radio access) and TCS (integration) deployed a fully indigenous, 5G-upgradeable 4G stack across roughly 98,000 sites for BSNL, connecting some 26,700 previously unconnected villages. India became one of only a handful of countries — alongside Finland, Sweden, South Korea and China — able to design, build and deploy a sovereign telecom stack. Tejas is now exploring export routes with partners including NEC and Rakuten.

For anyone tracking standard-essential patents, this is the moment to pay attention. A country that builds its own RAN and core moves, over time, from net SEP licensee to participant in the licensing pool — and the Bharat 6G Vision is explicitly aimed at contributing to standards by 2030, not just buying into them.

And the world's reference real-time payments system

UPI processed roughly 24,162 crore transactions worth ₹314 lakh crore (~$3.56 trillion) in FY2025-26, and accounts for close to half of global real-time payment volume. It is live across a dozen international partnerships, and India has signed digital public infrastructure cooperation agreements with more than 20 countries.

06 — Biotech & pharma

From volume to invention

India's bioeconomy has grown from around $10 billion in 2014 to $195.3 billion in 2025 — roughly 5% of GDP — against a stated target of $300 billion by 2030 under the BioE3 policy.

The emblematic product is NexCAR19, developed by ImmunoACT — an IIT Bombay spin-off — with Tata Memorial Centre, supported by DBT and BIRAC. Described as the world's first humanised CAR-T therapy, it delivers efficacy comparable to global CAR-T products at roughly one-tenth the cost, has reached 500+ patients across 30+ hospitals, and now has DBT-funded GMP lentiviral vector capacity being built for up to 1,000 patients a year.

That is a meaningful shift. Indian pharma's global position has historically been about volume: third-largest by volume, eleventh by value, around 20% of global generics supply, roughly 60% of global vaccine volume, and about 90% of WHO's measles vaccine demand, with exports of $30.5 billion in FY25. The volume-value gap is the whole story — and cell and gene therapy, biosimilars and novel biologics are where India is trying to close it.

07 — Infrastructure

A supply-chain lesson worth studying

The Chenab Bridge, inaugurated in June 2025, stands 359 metres above the river — 35 metres higher than the Eiffel Tower — as the world's highest railway arch bridge. It anchors the 272 km Udhampur–Srinagar–Baramulla link: 36 tunnels, 943 bridges, roughly ₹43,780 crore, and the first rail connection between the Kashmir valley and the rest of India.

But the more instructive story is about a machine India could not buy.

India is one of the world's largest consumers of tunnel boring machines and imports essentially all of them. Most large TBMs used in India are made by Germany's Herrenknecht — at its Guangzhou plant in China. After the 2020 Galwan clash, Chinese customs clearance for India-bound TBMs slowed to a standstill. Three machines critical to the Mumbai–Ahmedabad bullet train's 21 km underground section sat at port for over a year. In a now-famous exchange on the Delhi Metro, India's Commerce Minister told Germany's Vice Chancellor that India would look elsewhere if the blockade continued. Releasing the machines ultimately took the PMO, the Ministry of External Affairs and back-channel work between New Delhi, Berlin and Beijing. They landed at JNPT in March 2026.

India's response has two tracks. BEML issued an Expression of Interest in September 2025 for indigenous design and development of TBMs from 6 to 16.5 metres in diameter, explicitly seeking full IPR transfer to India. Separately, Herrenknecht signed an MoU to build a TBM manufacturing facility near Chennai for machines up to roughly 15.6 metres.

08 — Energy & critical minerals

One clear win, one unresolved problem

The win

India hit 50% of installed electricity capacity from non-fossil sources in June 2025 — five years ahead of its Paris NDC target. Total installed capacity crossed 500 GW in late 2025, and non-fossil capacity has since passed 300 GW. A ₹20,000 crore Nuclear Energy Mission is funding indigenous small modular reactors and Bharat Small Reactors for industrial decarbonisation, against a 100 GW nuclear target for 2047. The National Green Hydrogen Mission targets 5 million tonnes per annum by 2030.

The unresolved problem

In February 2023, the Geological Survey of India announced an inferred resource of 5.9 million tonnes of lithium ore at Salal–Haimana in Reasi, Jammu & Kashmir — potentially among the world's larger deposits, at grades reported above 500 ppm. Three years later, not a gram has been mined. The block failed to attract bidders in two auction attempts because exploration data was only at inferred (G3) stage, and industry would not commit. GSI was directed to re-explore to G2. India still imports 100% of its lithium.

The National Critical Mineral Mission, launched January 2025, is the corrective: dozens of critical mineral blocks auctioned, KABIL pursuing lithium blocks in Argentina, and outreach to the DRC, Zimbabwe and Namibia. A discovery is not a supply chain. That distinction is worth holding onto when reading any headline about critical minerals.

10 — Outlook

Where we think India is in five years

These are views, not forecasts. Reasonable people will disagree.

1. India becomes a first-filing jurisdiction for a meaningful set of technologies. Resident filings are already ~60% of applications, grant volumes have surged, and pendency to first action has fallen to around 10.6 months with a grant rate above 80%. By 2030, expect a material share of global portfolios in telecom, pharma process chemistry, automotive electronics and biomanufacturing to carry India as the priority filing.
2. Packaging becomes India's real semiconductor story. Not the 300mm fab headlines — the OSAT, compound semiconductor and glass-substrate cluster.
3. Defence exports approach or exceed the ₹50,000 crore 2029 target, driven by air defence, loitering munitions, artillery and missiles rather than platforms. Watch for the first genuinely indigenous jet engine partnership to be signed in this window.
4. Digital public infrastructure becomes India's most significant soft-power export, with UPI-style rails, digital identity and consent-based data exchange licensed or replicated across the Global South. The commercial and IP arrangements around those deployments are underexamined and will become a live legal question.
5. Critical minerals remain the binding constraint. Overseas acquisition and recycling technology will matter more than domestic discovery in this timeframe. Expect significant patent activity in battery recycling and rare-earth-free motor design.
6. The R&D intensity number moves — slowly. Getting GERD from 0.64% to even 1.2% of GDP by 2030 would be a genuine structural change. We would not bet on more than that.

11 — Implications

What this means if you own or advise a portfolio

For law firms, the opportunity is straightforward: a large and growing population of first-time Indian filers — startups, PSUs, university spin-offs, RDI-funded deep-tech ventures — who need portfolios built for the US, EPO, Japan and China from the outset, rather than retrofitted later. The RDI Scheme's explicit emphasis on localising intellectual property will accelerate this.