India’s biotechnology research needs money with a multi-year horizon – philanthropic funding should be explored
| AUTHOR | Arindam Goswami |
| DATE | November 4, 2026 |
| CATEGORIES | High Tech Geopolitics Research and Development Biotech |
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for optogenetics. Deisseroth is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a private foundation that appoints scientists for seven years at a time. The Indian Council of Medical Research is now taking applications for its First in the World challenge grants, which give up to Rs. 8 crore in stages of two, three and four years. The two announcements describe two ways of paying for biomedical research, and India uses the latter. The other, philanthropy, is close to untouched. India does not measure that route well enough and its corporate giving rules (CSR) make it hard, but the data from other countries suggest that it would add to public money and not replace it. India’s biotechnology research needs money with very long horizons and philanthropic funding could be used for this.
Biotechnology works on a long clock
Drug development takes an average of 10.5 years from the first human trial to approval, and 7.9% of candidates that enter that stage get there. Most failures come in the second phase, where only 28.9% move on. The discovery work itself before the first trial takes more years.
India’s biotechnology sector is now estimated at US$195.3 billion. Its public research money runs on shorter cycles. The Department of Biotechnology has Rs. 3446 crores for 2026-27, one budget year at a time, and its grants run three to five years. The ICMR grants end within four years. For patient work with long years, one has to keep reapplying, which is a hassle.
What India does not count
India does not report to UNESCO how much of its research spending comes from private non-profit bodies, although 91 of the 124 countries in the UNESCO series do. The Department of Science and Technology publishes research spending by the sector that carries it out, but it doesn’t have a line for philanthropy.
The closest Indian measure is corporate social responsibility (CSR) spending. Companies spent Rs. 34909 crores on CSR in 2023-24. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs lists 26 sectors, and the only science-related one is technology incubators. It received Rs. 1.91 crores, which is about 0.005% of the total. Animal welfare received Rs. 531 crores. Over the five years to 2023-24, the technology incubator head received Rs. 128 crores of Rs. 144159 crore.
Indian philanthropy is large. Private philanthropy was Rs. 1.31 lakh crore in FY2024, and the 191 donors on the 2025 Hurun list gave Rs. 10380 crores, 40% of it to education and 9% to healthcare. So, while the money exists, it goes to other causes.
What other countries do
Among 31 high-income countries, private non-profit bodies financed a median of 0.92% of national research and development between 1996 and 2015. The UK stood at 4.62%, Denmark at 3.65% and the US at 3.05%. Applied to India’s research spending of about Rs. 2.45 lakh crores, the median would be around Rs. 2250 crores a year, close to two-thirds of the DBT’s budget. The UK share would be about Rs. 11300 crores. These are illustrations of scale and are not to be treated as forecasts.
The large foundations differ from other funders in their structure. HHMI must spend at least 3.5% of its endowment on medical research each year, and it spent $846.5 million on it in the year to August 2025. Wellcome spent £1.9 billion in 2024/25 and plans £16 billion over the ten years to 2032. Its main awards run up to eight years. The Novo Nordisk Foundation awarded DKK 11.8 billion in 2025. Because these bodies live on endowments, their horizon is set by their mission.
Does philanthropy take the place of public money?
The usual worry is that private money lets the government off the hook. A comparison of 86 countries from 1996 to 2015 gives no sign of it. Where philanthropic funding per head is higher, government-financed research per head is no lower, and among high-income countries it is higher. While the comparison shows an association and cannot prove causality, it does remove the specific fear.
The same comparison could not show that a higher philanthropic share moves a country towards basic research or towards medical research. So, the claim that philanthropy would shift India’s research mix is not supported by these numbers, but the right response to this is to measure it in India.
The CSR rules cap the clock
Under the CSR rules amended in 2021, an ongoing project can last three years excluding the year it starts. Research money can go to incubators and projects funded by government, and to public universities, IITs and national laboratories. An independent charitable research trust doesn’t fit this description. A seven-year fellowship cannot be a CSR project under the present law.
India has one example, but it is small
The Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance has run five-year fellowships since 2008 as an independent charitable trust. Its initial commitment was £80 million over five years, split equally between the DBT and Wellcome, which is about Rs. 176 crores a year at current rates. That is 5% of the DBT budget.
A risk to design for
Novo Holdings’ assets fell from DKK 1,060 billion to DKK 694 billion in 2025, a drop of 34.5%, because the share price of Novo Nordisk fell. But the foundation’s awards rose in the same year because its spending follows a plan. India’s wealthiest donors hold most of their wealth in shares of their own companies. A fellowship fund financed from such wealth, therefore, needs to follow a spending plan, because otherwise the uncertainty would not be good for research.
What follows from this
Five steps follow from this evidence. India should first and foremost count philanthropic research funding, by adding a line in the national science survey and a research head in the CSR data. It should let CSR money go to independent research trusts supervised by the Anusandhan National Research Foundation and let it stay committed for up to ten years, which matches the 10.5-year drug development average. It should set up one such trust for biotechnology fellowships, with a scientific board, multi-year awards and a government match of one rupee for each rupee raised. A one-to-one match is enough, because field evidence on charitable matching found that higher ratios did not raise giving further. The trust should adopt a spending rule over a multi-year average of its assets to remove uncertainty. And it should draw its fellows by lot from a shortlist of equals and track the others too, so that India can learn lessons from what the money achieves using this other comparison group.
This is not to say that public and venture funding are not necessary. They are here to stay. The case here is narrow: for the slowest and most uncertain early stages of biotechnology research, India has left its longest-horizon funder unused.