How innovative is India?

What does 38th actually measure?

India is 38th of 139 economies in the Global Innovation Index 2026, published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the United Nations agency for patents and copyright. Switzerland is first, Sweden second and the United States third.

The number is an average of 79 indicators, and India has values for 77 of them. Some count things that are plainly about invention, such as patent applications, research spending and scientific papers. Others describe the conditions around invention: the rule of law, school enrolment, logistics, credit, tariffs, venture capital deals. WIPO sorts them into seven pillars. Five measure inputs, the things a country puts in.

Two measure outputs, the knowledge, technology and creative work that comes out. India's overall score is 40.1 out of 100.

The rank everyone quotes is relative. It moves when India changes, and also when other countries change, when WIPO changes what it counts, and when economies join or leave the table. The table has had as few as 125 economies (2011) and as many as 143 (2014).

So the lead chart does not plot the rank itself. It plots the share of the other ranked economies India sits ahead of. In 2015, at 81st of 141, India was ahead of 43 per cent of them. In 2026, at 38th of 139, it is ahead of 73 per cent. In plain terms, India has moved from the bottom half of the table into its top third.

That is a real climb, and the rest of this article is about what it is made of.

Has India always got more out than it puts in?

Yes, in every edition since 2011. The index has two halves, and India has always done better on the outputs half than on the inputs half.

In 2011 India was 87th on inputs and 44th on outputs. In 2026 it is 49th and 25th. Both have risen and the gap has narrowed, but outputs are still well ahead. WIPO used to publish this gap as an efficiency ratio, outputs divided by inputs, and India ranked second in the world on it in 2012.

That reading, that India gets more out of what it has than most countries, is fair as far as it goes. WIPO itself later warned that high ratios "often reflected blatant deficiencies in the input side". That is the other reading, which the rest of this article tests, is that India's outputs rest on a few large things, IT services above all, while the inputs that make invention routine, such as researchers, money for research and skilled jobs, have been slower to come.

How exact is a rank?

Less exact than the number suggests. The index is built from choices: which indicators, how to weight them, how to fill gaps. The European Commission's Joint Research Centre audits the index every year by varying those choices and recording how far each economy's rank moves. For India in 2026 the answer is a range from 34th to 39th.

Five economies sit inside that range with India: Malaysia, Slovenia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Poland. Put plainly, India's place among these six depends on modelling choices. Moving from 38th to 36th, or falling to 39th, would not tell you much. Moving from the 40s to the 30s over several years does. The auditors find that for 86 of the 139 economies the range is 10 places or fewer. India's, six places wide, is tighter than most.

Did India really climb 43 places?

From 81st in 2015 to 38th in 2026 is 43 places. Part of that climb is India, and part of it is the yardstick.

WIPO says so itself. Every edition carries the same warning, repeated in Appendix I of the 2026 report: scores and rankings "are not directly comparable between one year and another". It lists four reasons a rank can move: the economy's actual performance, changes to the framework, updates and gaps in the data, and changes in which economies are included. WIPO has never recomputed old ranks on a single consistent method, so nobody can split India's climb exactly into these parts.

Some of the breaks are visible. In 2016 the table shrank from 141 economies to 128, and WIPO redefined its patent measure, counting inventions filed in two or more patent offices instead of three. India jumped from 81st to 66th that year. In share-of-the-table terms, the move is smaller than it sounds: from ahead of 43 per cent to ahead of 49 per cent. In 2025 six more economies joined and the venture capital indicators were rebuilt. The 2015 rank itself sat at the very bottom of its audited range, 73rd to 81st: 81st was the least favourable reading of that year's data.

There is one more thing a careful reader should know. The Government of India has a target for this index. At the New Delhi launch of the 2019 edition, the commerce minister, Piyush Goyal, said India "will not rest on past laurels" until it is among the top 25, up from an earlier goal of the top 50 set by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He repeated the top-25 aim in 2022. Countries have chased rankings before.

Political scientists Rush Doshi, Judith Kelley and Beth Simmons showed how the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business ranking moved governments to change specific rules in order to climb it, and India's multi-year, inter-ministry push up that table is their case study. Nothing in WIPO's data suggests India's figures are wrong. Their work suggests that a ranking governments target can move the things it counts faster than the things it does not. Whether that has happened with this index is an open question, but it is worth keeping in mind for the patent numbers later in this piece: when India reached 40th in 2022, the commerce ministry's own release credited, among other things, a 46 per cent rise in domestic patent filings over five years.

Official summaries also blur the history. The Economic Survey 2025-26 says India's rank "improved from 66th in 2019 to 38th in 2025". WIPO's 2019 report, and the commerce ministry's own press release on the day it launched in New Delhi, put India at 52nd. India was 66th in 2013 and 2016, not 2019. The same Survey, in a more careful passage in its external-sector chapter, notes that India's improvement "has been slower than that of several peer economies, including China", particularly in high-technology manufacturing and private R&D. That passage is the better guide.

Where is India world-class, and where is it near the bottom?

The single rank averages over very different results. Of the 77 indicators where India has a value, it is in the world's top 20 on 15, and in the top 10 on five. It is in the bottom half on 25, and below 100th on five. Its median rank is 48th.

The top ranks have a pattern. India is first in the world for information and communication technology (ICT) services exports as a share of its trade, third for the size of its domestic market, and fourth for its share of the world's late-stage venture capital deals. It is tenth on the value of its unicorns relative to GDP. Two of its best eleven ranks, on finance for startups and on entrepreneurship policy, come from expert-opinion surveys run by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor rather than from counted data.

The bottom ranks have a pattern too. India is 83rd on researchers per person, 98th on the share of workers in knowledge-intensive jobs, 103rd on the share of women employed with advanced degrees, and 115th on foreign students as a share of those enrolled in its universities. The high ranks mostly measure size, markets and IT services. The low ones mostly measure people, per head.

Where does India's lead come from?

India scores 40.1. A typical economy, built from the median score on each of the seven pillars and weighted the way the index weights them, scores 30.3. That makes India about 10 points ahead.

Three-quarters of that lead comes from the two output pillars. Knowledge and technology outputs alone supply about 5 of the 10 points, and creative outputs about 2.5. The five input pillars together add about 2.3. India is above the median economy on every pillar, but on institutions, infrastructure and business sophistication it is only just above it.

What has changed since 2022?

The editions from 2022 to 2026 share a database format, so the pillars can be compared over these five years with less risk, though WIPO's warning about framework changes still applies.

India rose on both output pillars. On knowledge and technology outputs it went from 34th to 15th, but most of that jump came in one edition, 2023, when WIPO replaced one of the pillar's indicators. Out went new businesses per person, on which India ranked 114th; in came the value of unicorns relative to GDP, on which it ranked 9th. The knowledge impact sub-pillar moved from 56th to 9th that year. Knowledge creation, where patents and papers sit, moved more slowly, from 46th to 39th over the four years.

On creative outputs India went from 52nd to 43rd. Infrastructure also improved, from 78th to 62nd. Every other input pillar slipped: institutions from 54th to 60th, human capital and research from 43rd to 54th, business sophistication from 54th to 63rd, and market sophistication from 19th to 35th. Most of the last fall came in the 2025 edition, when WIPO replaced its venture capital measures. Both moves, up and down, are partly a change of ruler. The pattern is the one the two-line chart showed: what India produces is climbing faster than what it puts in.

Is India big, or is it advanced?

Both, depending on how you divide. This is the most useful single correction to the headline rank.

Count totals and India is a giant. Indian residents filed about 63,000 patent applications in 2024, the fifth-largest number in the world. Indian researchers published about 2.3 lakh scientific articles in 2023, third in the world. India had about 3.6 lakh full-time researchers in 2020, eighth, and its R&D spending, converted at purchasing power, was ninth. Its ICT services exports were about $200 billion in 2025, second only to Ireland's.

Divide by people and the picture changes. Per person, India ranks 38th on patents, 89th on scientific articles, 83rd on researchers, 84th on R&D spending and 64th on ICT exports. A country of 1.46 billion looks large on any total. The innovation index divides most of its counts by GDP rather than by population: 25 of its 79 indicators are scaled to GDP and only six to population. Because India's income per person is low, dividing by GDP is kinder to it than dividing by people.

Is that good for a country of India's income?

Yes, and this is the strongest case for the 38th. Richer countries score higher on the index: across the 139 economies, income per person and the GII score are closely related. India's score is about 13.5 points above what its income would predict, the eighth-largest margin of any economy. The seven ahead of it are China and six rich countries: Switzerland, Sweden, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the United States and Finland.

WIPO has called India an "innovation overperformer" for its income in every edition since 2011, 16 years running. Only Viet Nam shares that record. India's score is higher than those of 33 of the 35 upper-middle-income economies in the index, all but China and Malaysia, and of 19 of the 54 high-income ones. For a lower-middle-income country that is a real achievement, and it is the reading the government's press releases emphasise.

How current is the data?

The index is published in 2026, but its numbers describe different years. Of India's 77 values, 30 describe 2024, 29 describe 2025 and 3 describe 2026. Five describe 2020, and all five are about research: R&D spending as a share of GDP, R&D performed and financed by business, researchers per person, and the share of researchers in business.

That is a gap in India's statistics, not a choice by WIPO. The index takes R&D figures from UNESCO, whose release of February 2026 ends India at 2020. The Department of Science and Technology (DST) published newer figures only in July 2026. So the 2026 index judges India's research base on figures from the year of the first lockdown.

How much does India spend on research?

Less than most of its peers, on any figure. UNESCO's last number for India is 0.65 per cent of GDP in 2020. The world spends about 2.6 per cent, China 2.6, South Korea 4.9, Brazil 1.2. Five of the twelve peers in the chart spend less than India: South Africa, Viet Nam (0.41 per cent), Indonesia, the Philippines and Mexico.

DST's new R&D Statistics, published in July 2026, put India at 0.84 per cent of GDP in 2023-24, which DST calls an all-time high. That looks like a big jump from 0.64 per cent in 2020-21, and much of it is likely a change in counting. 2020-21 was also a low base: central-government R&D fell that year, during the pandemic, from about ₹69,000 crore to ₹61,000 crore. From 2021-22 the figures come from a new National Science and Technology Survey, a census of more than 8,000 institutions that counts research at private universities as a separate line. For the three years before, university research had been estimated by projecting forward growth rates from 2010-11 to 2015-16.

Measured private-sector R&D rises by almost 80 per cent in the single year across the break, from about ₹46,000 crore to about ₹83,000 crore. DST did not revise the earlier years on the new basis, so there is no like-for-like comparison across the break. The honest reading is that India spends somewhat more than the old figures showed, and still far less than the world average.

People tell the same story. India had 259 full-time researchers per million people in 2020, fewer than any peer in this chart. DST's new survey counts 354 in 2023-24, on its wider basis, which would still leave India below every peer except the Philippines. China had about 2,100 in 2023 and the world about 1,650 in 2020. How much India spends on research looks at who pays and where the money goes.

What is behind the patent boom?

India's patent count is the GII number that has risen fastest. Indian applicants filed 13,219 applications at the Indian Patent Office in 2016-17 and 68,201 in 2024-25, about five times as many. On WIPO's patent measure, India's rank rose from 28th in the 2022 index to 16th in 2026. Patents are one input to the knowledge and technology outputs pillar, though, as the previous part showed, a change of indicator moved that pillar more.

Who files explains most of the rise. In 2024-25 educational institutions filed 37,681 applications, 55 per cent of all Indian filings. Individuals filed 17,170, companies, government labs and other organisations 8,095, and startups and small firms about 5,300.

Universities became a separate category only in September 2021, when the Patents (Amendment) Rules extended an 80 per cent fee cut to educational institutions. Before that they filed alongside companies and other organisations. Adding the two groups gives a fair comparison across the change: 11,150 applications in 2020-21 and 45,776 in 2024-25, four times as many in four years.

The largest filers are mostly private universities. Lovely Professional University, a private university in Punjab, filed 2,241 applications in 2024-25, more than all the IITs together, which filed 1,740. Lovely Professional University was already filing 545 a year in 2020-21, before the fee cut. Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences in Chennai filed 2,038. In 2020-21 the largest filer on IP India's list of research organisations was the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), with 200 applications. By 2024-25 that list was filled by universities; tenth place needed 227 applications.

Incentives are a likely part of the explanation, though the reports do not say why any institution files. The National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), which ranks Indian universities, gives marks for patents granted and also for patent applications published: up to 4.5 of a university's 100 marks, a third of that for published applications. The accreditation manual of the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) counts patents "published/awarded", and the University Grants Commission's 2018 regulations give teachers research points for patents towards appointment and promotion. After the fee cut an application is cheap, and it counts, modestly, towards a university's ranking, its accreditation and its teachers' careers. Zvi Griliches warned in his survey of patent statistics that counts move with the rules of the patent system as well as with invention, and that is what a careful reader should expect here.

That does not make the inventions worthless. It means the count cannot say. IP India does not publish grants by type of applicant, so nobody can tell how many university applications become patents. Grants overall swing with the patent office's pace: 1,03,057 in 2023-24, then 33,504 in 2024-25. International applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty, which cost more and are usually made for inventions worth protecting abroad, rose from about 1,900 in 2020 to about 4,500 in 2024, then fell to about 3,100 in 2025. More than half of the applications behind India's patent numbers now come from universities, and a count of applications cannot say how many of them are valuable.

Is India's IT strength innovation?

India's first-place indicator is ICT services exports: software, IT services and the like, as a share of the country's trade. In dollars it is a huge business, up from about $23 billion in 2005 to about $200 billion in 2025.

Measured against the world, though, it is an old strength rather than a new one. India's share of global ICT services exports rose from 12.7 per cent in 2005 to a peak of 17.2 per cent in 2012, fell to 12.6 per cent in 2021, and was 13.9 per cent in 2024. India's IT industry grew about as fast as the world's.

Whether this counts as innovation depends on what you mean. These are services sold to clients abroad, and much of the value ends up inside other companies' products. Nirmalya Kumar and Phanish Puranam called this India's "invisible" innovation: research and business processes run in India for firms elsewhere, business-to-business products and process improvements, rather than Indian brands the world would recognise.

Which Indian cities count as innovation clusters?

Inventions concentrate in cities, so WIPO also ranks the world's top 100 science and technology clusters, places dense with patent filings, scientific papers and, since 2025, venture capital deals. India has four in 2026. Bengaluru is 25th, Delhi 27th, Mumbai 43rd and Chennai 79th.

They are not alike. Bengaluru files the most international patent applications of the four, and Samsung, a South Korean company, files about a fifth of them; it is the largest filer in Delhi too. Delhi publishes the most scientific papers, more than twice Bengaluru's count, but files few international patents. Mumbai's patents lean on Jio, which files 29 per cent of them, and Chennai's on TVS Motor, with 33 per cent. On the research side, the Indian Institute of Science writes 35 per cent of Bengaluru's papers, and IIT Bombay 34 per cent of Mumbai's.

The same tables, divided by population, tell a different story. On intensity per person, Bengaluru is 83rd of the 100, and Delhi, Chennai and Mumbai are 96th, 97th and 98th. Only Mexico City and Cairo sit below them. These are big clusters spread over very large populations, more than 31 million people in WIPO's Delhi cluster alone.

The Economic Survey 2025-26 says Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai "feature among the top 50 most innovation-intensive clusters in the world". In the 2025 edition the Survey cites, they were in the top 50 by size, at 21st, 26th and 46th. By intensity they were 83rd, 95th and 97th.

AnnaLee Saxenian, who studied Bengaluru's software industry, wrote in 2001 that comparing it with Silicon Valley was "not only misleading but also distracts attention" from the larger challenges. She traced its rise to policy, from the 1984 computer policy to the software technology parks of the early 1990s, and argued for a view of technology wider than the software industry. The intensity numbers suggest the point still stands.

Which states file the most patents?

IP India also records each application's state, which is the applicant's address. In 2024-25 Tamil Nadu filed 15,440 applications, almost twice Karnataka's 8,371 and more than any other state. Per person it leads the states too, with about 200 applications per million people, followed by Punjab (143), Karnataka (122), Uttarakhand (114), Delhi (114) and Telangana (112). Chandigarh, a small union territory, is higher still at 230. Bihar files about 2.5 per million: Tamil Nadu files 80 times as many per person.

Several of the top-filing states are home to the largest academic filers. Tamil Nadu is home to Saveetha, Sathyabama and VIT, three of the ten largest academic filers, and Punjab to Lovely Professional University. Because the count follows the applicant's address, a university's applications land in its home state wherever its inventors work. The patent office does not split each state's count by type of applicant, so the university share in each state cannot be measured.

How has India moved against its peers?

Against economies at a similar stage, India has held its ground and edged up. Among eleven middle-income economies in this comparison, India was fourth by GII score in 2022, behind China, Malaysia and Türkiye. In 2026 it is third, behind China and Malaysia.

In the full table, India moved from 40th to 38th over these four years. Viet Nam moved from 48th to 43rd, the Philippines from 59th to 52nd, and Indonesia from 75th to 55th, the largest climb in the group. Türkiye fell from 37th to 45th and Mexico from 58th to 65th. The table grew from 132 economies to 139 over the same years, so small moves in the 30s and 40s mean little. India's climb since 2022 has been slower than its climb in the five years before.

Is Viet Nam's path the same as India's?

No. India and Viet Nam are the two longest-running overperformers in the index, and they got there by different routes.

India is far ahead on knowledge and technology outputs, 15th against Viet Nam's 35th, and on human capital and research, 54th against 79th. Viet Nam is ahead on business sophistication, 48th against India's 63rd, and on creative outputs, 35th against 43rd. The difference shows in trade: Viet Nam is first in the world on high-technology exports as a share of its trade, India 35th, while India is first on ICT services. Viet Nam makes and ships electronics; India sells services and has a much larger research base. China is in the world's top 25 on six of the seven pillars and first on knowledge and technology outputs. It is ahead of India on all seven, by a wide margin on every one except institutions.

So, how innovative is India?

More than its income predicts, and less than its size suggests.

The climb from the bottom half of the index to its top third is real, and some of it comes from changes in the index itself rather than in India. India's strengths are large and genuine: IT services, a deep market, a growing startup economy, a large research workforce in absolute terms. Its weaknesses are per person: researchers, money for research, skilled jobs, women with advanced degrees. The index rewards the first set heavily, which is why India ranks well. The second set is what makes a country inventive across the board rather than in a few cities and a few industries.

The numbers to watch are the per-person ones: researchers per million people and R&D as a share of GDP. They are harder to improve by targeting a ranking. The economics of catching up points the same way: Xavier Cirera and William Maloney's World Bank study, The Innovation Paradox, finds that poorer countries gain most from building the capabilities to absorb and use existing technology, and that firms in these countries invest too little in them.