Kris Gopalakrishnan is excited about BSNL’s roll-out of its indigenous 5G-ready stack. The first fully indigenous 4G (5G-ready) network has nearly 98,000 ‘Swadeshi’ 4G towers, and the core network has been developed by C-DOT, with Tejas Networks’ Radio Access Network, and integration has been done by Tata Consultancy Services. “We need more products and technologies to come out of India,” says Gopalakrishnan, co-founder of India’s second largest IT services company, Infosys, hoping that other communication service providers also look at this.  

With patient capital being key to sustaining R&D, Gopalakrishnan—now deeply engaged with India’s Quantum Mission—sees the government's recent ₹1 lakh crore Research Development and Innovation (RDI) Scheme Fund as a step in the right direction. While India’s consumer-centric startups and fintech startups have found a strong foothold, Gopalakrishnan says that for deeptech companies to thrive, the ecosystem is slowly coming together and is now in search of the right heroes. Citing the successes of firms such as Ather, which started out as battery research project during college days of the founders at IIT Madras, or Bugworks, whose R&D centre in Bengaluru is carrying out research on how to combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and cancer, Gopalakrishnan sees such success stories of deeptech companies coming out of India as important. For founders, the market rewards can be delayed. “Here (the deep tech space), it's 15 years-plus, so somebody has to dedicate their life to bring out something, ” says Gopalakrishnan. “That's why successes are important, because that then gives others the hope that if we do this, we can also succeed.”  

India’s Quantum Mission 

As Chairman of the Mission Governing Board for the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS)—constituted under the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India—Gopalakrishnan says that some startups selected under the National Quantum Mission could have a huge impact in the world of computer sciences. The National Quantum Mission, launched in 2023 with an outlay of ₹6,000 crore to be spent between FY24 and FY31, aims to seed, nurture, and scale-up scientific and industrial R&D in quantum technology. It had received more than 100 applications from startups, and those selected include QpiAI and QNu Labs, among several others. “After artificial intelligence and machine learning, quantum technology has a significant impact.  India, I believe has an opportunity to somewhat shape this area,” says Gopalakrishnan, citing examples of breakthroughs such as at IISc where researchers have developed a six-qubit photonic system.  

While the country’s success in the pharma industry may have made India the vaccine capital of the world, those learnings need to be emulated in other sectors says the Infosys co-founder. “We have been very good at generic drugs, but in other fields we have a long way to go in commercialising [them]. It's not the lab work, but the lab to market that takes time,” explains Gopalakrishnan. With the government’s willingness to support advanced research now gathering steam, he thinks now is the right time for the private sector to step up spending on research to take it up to at least 3% of the GDP.