Dr. R.A. Mashelkar

Thirty-nine years. Zero US patents. That was the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune, before 1989 — not a single American patent to its name in nearly four decades.

Then a scientist named Ramesh Mashelkar took over as its director. Within a few years, that same lab was licensing patents to General Electric, DuPont and Dow. He went on to become Director General of India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, sit on the boards of Reliance, Tata Motors and Hindustan Unilever, chair the committee that selected the technology behind Swachh Bharat, and become a Padma Vibhushan recipient.

He sat down with The Clarity Project — not to talk about the past, but to answer a harder question: did India actually get good at innovation, or did it just get comfortable with good enough? His answer starts by taking apart a word most of us use with pride.

Ask most Indians what makes us innovative, and jugaad comes up fast — the rubber band, the fix, the workaround. Dr. Mashelkar disagrees, and he has a framework for why. He breaks innovation into three categories: more from more, for less and less people — products that get more expensive and more feature-loaded with every generation, like each new iPhone; less from less, for more and more people — this is jugaad, cutting cost by cutting corners, with no consideration for safety or environmental impact (he points directly at jugaad vehicles that have collapsed and injured schoolchildren); and more from less, for more and more people — the one he has spent his career chasing. Use fewer resources, deliver higher performance, reach more people. He calls it Affordable Excellence.

The idea traces back to 2008, when he became the first Indian honoured as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology, Science and Engineering, with an acceptance talk titled "Indian Innovation: From Gandhi to Gandhian Engineering" — a reference to Gandhi's line that nature provides enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed. A paper he later co-wrote with C.K. Prahalad in the Harvard Business Review, "More From Less For More," became one of the most-read innovation papers of its time.

Affordable Excellence is not a slogan for him — it is already saving lives at prices that sound almost unbelievable. Breast cancer detection usually means mammography: expensive, painful, out of reach outside a city hospital. Dr. Mashelkar described a handheld device, now used in over 20 countries, that screens a woman for around ₹100, with no pain and no radiation. Two out of three women who die of breast cancer die because it was caught late.

Then there's tuberculosis. The standard route is a hospital visit, an X-ray, a sputum test, and a one-to-two-week wait. His foundation backed a device that uses AI to analyse a cough signature through a mobile phone — under ₹10 a test, non-invasive, FDA approved, roughly 90 percent accurate, published in a journal of the standing of Nature. During a community testing camp near Pune, one villager waved the team off, insisting he was healthy. He agreed to the ten-minute test anyway. He had TB, with no symptoms — and in that same camp, three people tested positive without ever having felt sick a day.

That belief — that illness hides for years before it shows — led to what he now calls the AffEx Care Kit: around 20 tests, from blood pressure to lung health, all AI-powered, all in about 10 minutes, all for roughly a dollar, now active across more than 15 countries. In a Pune study of 15,000 children tested for anaemia, 62 percent came back anaemic — low haemoglobin means less oxygen to the brain, which means compromised development in the very children India is counting on.

If Affordable Excellence is the philosophy, patents are where he believes India has been most misunderstood. India crossed 1.44 lakh patent filings last year, a 30 percent jump and a national record — China files around 1.8 million a year, the US around 5 lakh. But Dr. Mashelkar's response isn't about catching up on volume. It's about what he calls patent illiteracy. "Illiteracy is the inability to read and the inability to write," he explained. Read a patent well, and you know how to design around it. Write one well, and nobody can design around yours.

He lived this shift personally at the National Chemical Laboratory — from a blank patent record to licensing GE, DuPont and Dow, a shift loud enough that GE opened an R&D centre in Bangalore, part of why India now has over 1,500 R&D and global capability centres. But he is careful to separate filing from value: "Patents don't mean anything to me if they are not valorised," turned into licensed, commercialised wealth.

He offers a piece of history to explain the stakes. In 1898, J.C. Bose demonstrated the technology behind wireless communication, years before Marconi — Sister Nivedita urged him to patent it, he refused, believing knowledge should be free, and Indian schoolchildren still grow up crediting Marconi. Exactly a century later, in 1998, Dr. Mashelkar personally fought India's turmeric and Basmati patent battles against foreign claims. "1898 to 1998," he said, "a journey from Bose to Basmati." Reliance Jio is his proof the gap is closing — from almost no patent presence a decade ago to ranking among the world's top filers today.

India spends most of its innovation energy on engineers and scientists. But turning an idea into something that reaches a billion people is a completely different skill from generating the idea itself. His framework for the gap, ASSURED, comes from his book on affordable excellence, winner of the Best Business Book of the Year award in 2019: Affordable, Scalable, Sustainable, User-friendly, Rapid, Excellence in the underlying technology, Distinctive. When the government launched Swachh Bharat, Dr. Mashelkar chaired the committee selecting which sanitation technologies to fund — ASSURED was the literal scoring matrix, not gut feel, and it is still in use today.

He also pushed back gently on India's startup funding pattern, where technical founders are consistently favoured over founders who understand markets or distribution. Real innovation, in his view, is never just technological — it is business model, distribution, policy and design innovation working together, a pattern he's watched play out on the boards of Reliance, Tata Motors and Hindustan Unilever.

For 18 years, Dr. Mashelkar chaired the National Innovation Foundation alongside Professor Anil Gupta, whose founding principle he still quotes: "everyone is someone, and minds on the margin are not marginal minds." Presidents Kalam, Patil and Mukherjee all personally championed its work.

The story he told to bring it alive: a 13-year-old named Shalini, from Bihar, watched her grandfather struggle to climb stairs with his walker and designed a version with spring-loaded front legs to help him — rough, built with whatever she had. The Foundation connected her with the National Institute of Design, who refined it into a proper product. More than 10,000 of her walkers have since sold, and her royalty income surpassed her father's salary. The pattern he wants replicated everywhere: connect raw problem-solving with formal design support, instead of expecting grassroots innovators to do both alone.

Software scales almost instantly. Semiconductors, advanced materials and quantum technology do not — they're expensive, slow and genuinely risky, which is exactly why Dr. Mashelkar believes government has to be the first mover, not the last. In 2000, as head of CSIR, he created the New Millennium Indian Technology Leadership Initiative to fund "grand challenges" — a $2,000 laptop rebuilt for $200, a six-to-eight-month leather tanning process cut to two. More than 100 private companies and 250 institutions have taken part since.

The bigger shift was cultural. Government audit systems assume nothing should fail; he introduced a different standard inside the programme: FAIL, or First Attempt In Learning. "Your best guru is your last mistake," he said, "as long as you learn from it." The results: BioSuite, a bioinformatics product built in 18 months by pairing TCS with 19 CSIR genomics labs that neither side could have built alone — and indigenous fuel cell technology, 40 to 50 percent cheaper than international alternatives, that now powers a passenger ferry running in Varanasi, its only exhaust water. "We don't need venture capital," he said. "We need adventure capital."

India's private sector contributes only around 36 percent of the country's total R&D spend — in the US, Japan and South Korea, that number is above 70 percent. Every Prime Minister since Rajiv Gandhi in 1989 has pledged to raise India's R&D spend toward 2 percent of GDP; it has stayed stuck well below that for decades. His read isn't a lack of intent — it's that incentives like weighted tax deductions for R&D spend have largely disappeared, and industry has been asking for them back. The bright spot: a new National Research Fund built to close the gap between a lab prototype and something a company can actually commercialise.

He also laid out five distinct ways a country acquires technology, each with a real example from his career: Buy (India was refused alpha olefin sulfonate technology by Japan, Europe and the US, who didn't want to create a future competitor); Make (India's own supercomputing programme, built after the technology was denied — and once it succeeded, the same companies came back offering to sell); Make to buy better (Indian Petrochemicals' own pilot plant made the earlier refusers reconsider once India became a credible competitor); Buy to make better (Reliance acquiring advanced sodium-ion battery technology to build further from, versus KPIT building its own from scratch); and Make together (the KPIT–National Chemical Laboratory fuel cell partnership neither could have built alone).

Asked what needs to happen by 2035 for India to look back on this as its best innovation decade, Dr. Mashelkar gave three answers. First, India has to want to lead, not follow — he believes Affordable Excellence, especially in AI-powered health tech, is where India's advantage is most natural and most exportable. Second, India has to move from patent filing to patent dominance: real global market share — his benchmark is 10 percent — in AI, biotechnology, quantum technology and advanced materials. Third, the weakest link has to get stronger: public procurement, where standard lowest-cost tendering was never built to buy a new technology from an unproven startup.

As co-chairman of the Maharashtra State Innovation Society, he pushed to change tendering rules that required startups to show ten years of experience. "You would not be a startup," he said, "if you had ten years of experience." One company that builds drones to clear debris from water, screened on ASSURED criteria instead of years-in-business, went from a municipal contract to supplying the Indian Army to a partnership with Boeing within a year. His summary of what made it possible: "Talent, technology and trust."

On one last gap — that innovation cells are common in engineering colleges and nearly absent in arts and commerce ones, despite those streams making up a huge share of India's students — his answer reframed the premise entirely. Innovation just means doing things differently to make a difference, and India already leads the world in creative fields. What's missing isn't talent. It's a matrix to measure that creativity the way technical innovation already gets measured.