On 21 August, Malaysia’s economy minister announced the first “Made in Malaysia” chips to be in production. Four local companies have begun designing chips using Arm technology, with eight technology-access packages now offered across five firms. First designs are expected by around 2028, and the government’s ambition is for locally developed Arm-based chips to enter production — and Malaysia’s own semiconductor supply chain — by 2030. Against the target of training 10,000 integrated-circuit design engineers over four years, 1,530 have completed the programme so far.

What Malaysia bought

Arm is a British semiconductor intellectual-property company. It does not usually manufacture chips. Instead, it licenses the processor designs and other building blocks that companies use to develop chips for phones, vehicles, industrial equipment, data centres and AI systems. Most firms negotiate such licences directly with Arm for a particular product or commercial purpose.

Malaysia has taken a different route. In March 2025, the Malaysian Investment Development Authority signed what Arm described as its first national-level partnership. The government committed RM1.11 billion — around US$250 million — paid over ten years for access to Arm’s intellectual-property licences and compute subsystems, alongside training and support. Arm will also collect royalties if chips developed under the arrangement are sold.

The crucial distinction to note is that Malaysia has not bought Arm’s intellectual property outright but instead it has bought structured access to it. The government is acting as a strategic purchaser and allocator: it holds a fixed inventory of access tokens — 22 Flexible Access and four compute-subsystem tokens remain available after the first awards — and it decides which local companies receive them, connecting that access to a national talent programme. Access has now become a policy instrument, not a purchase order.

The scoreboard

The arrangement has three parts: train 10,000 integrated chip design engineers, provide selected local firms with Arm licences, and support the development of Malaysian-designed semiconductor products. This is a more purposeful model than offering tax incentives and hoping foreign investment spills over into domestic capability. So how is each pillar of this capability compact performing?

Technology access is the strongest.

The first formal awards, in May, went to GreatAsic Technology, SkyeChip and Oppstar — GreatAsic receiving both Flexible Access and the more production-ready compute subsystems, the other two starting on Flexible Access. Oppstar has since been offered a compute-subsystem token of its own, dated 3 August, for work spanning telecommunications and data centres. Handing over the offer letters, the economy minister put the accountability where it now resides: this is not merely approval, he told the recipients — it is a call to deliver.

And access comes with obligations. The government has set out the commitments recipients must fulfil: employ local skilled talent, create greater value within the industry supply chain, and develop local design capability and homegrown technology.

In August it added two harder conditions — chip manufacturing activity must take place in Malaysia, and recipients face requirements to recruit highly skilled local engineers — with each token assessed against the customers a company has already identified. What is not public is any set of quantified milestones, dates or clawback terms.

The compact’s obligations, so far, are directional rather than contractual — enforced by ministerial attention, not a publicly disclosed performance agreement. That is the design question Malaysia has yet to answer.

Skills are moving, but slowly. The 1,530 engineers trained is genuine progress — a 200-hour programme run with the Advanced Semiconductor Academy of Malaysia and now being rolled out through twelve universities — yet it is barely 15 per cent of the target.

And the hardest pillars remain untested: commercial products, locally owned advanced packaging capability and globally scaled exports are all still promises with dates attached.

What India has done differently

India has a related but less concentrated model. In 2023, C-DAC partnered with Arm to extend Arm Flexible Access for Startups — at zero licence fee — to firms qualifying under India’s Design Linked Incentive scheme. The programme gives eligible start-ups access to IP, tools, reference designs and training, alongside government design incentives.

That is valuable, but it is different. India connects its start-ups to Arm’s existing access programme; Malaysia is using government purchasing power to assemble a national platform for selected firms, with the state deciding who gets what and holding recipients to a delivery test.

One approach lowers a barrier. The other builds an instrument.

Which produces capability faster is now an empirical question — and Malaysia has volunteered to run the experiment first.

The strategic question

As I have argued in my previous articles, this is where the capability compact idea matters.

A trade or technology agreement should not only ask what crosses a border. It should ask what remains behind: engineers, local firms, design knowledge, supplier capability and products that can compete beyond the home market.

Malaysia’s Arm experiment is not yet proof that the model works — the training numbers alone say the compact is unfinished business.

But it is the clearest current attempt in ASEAN to make the proposition real, and 2028 will tell us whether structured access can do what four decades of hosting other people’s factories could not.

Government’s designing industrial policy must acknowledge that buying technology is simply a transaction and that building capability is the real test for institutions that give policy shape and form. Malaysia has signed up for both.

Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality

Dr Christopher Vas writes The Missing Middle IQ, a publication on the institutions that turn policy ambition into commercial reality in India’s innovation economy. He is Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Canterbury and General Manager of the Food Innovation Precinct Western Australia, with two decades of experience across innovation policy, technology commercialisa

In early July 2026, negotiators reviewing the ASEAN–India Trade in Goods Agreement were told to hurry up. The review of the 2010 pact missed its December 2025 deadline, and the numbers explain the impatience. Bilateral trade reached US$128 billion in 2025–26 — but India’s goods deficit with the bloc has widened to over US$50 billion, from around US$5 billion in the year before the agreement came into force. Since 2010, India’s imports from ASEAN have nearly quadrupled. Its exports have not even doubled.

The relationship is not short of trade and commerce but instead what commerce has failed to produce – shared industrial capability.

The surface reading

The standard response is to fix the pact — tariff asymmetries, rules of origin, non-tariff barriers, the suspicion that some ASEAN economies serve as conduits for re-routed Chinese goods. These concerns are legitimate, and the review should address them. Yet suppose every one of them were resolved tomorrow. Would a cleaner tariff schedule change what the relationship?

A trade agreement can lower the cost of what crosses a border. It cannot, on its own, build capabilities that matter. Think skilled people, stronger institutions, deeper suppliers, local technical knowledge, new problem-solving capacity and more. Last week I argued that India’s industrial engagement with China is quietly converging on a capability compact — access exchanged for learning. The ASEAN relationship needs the same logic, and the interesting thing is that it is already running – in both directions, at once.

Ho Chi Minh City: capability exported

In November 2024, India inaugurated in Vietnam the Centre of Excellence in Software Development and Training at the Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology in Ho Chi Minh City. The Centre is funded through the ASEAN–India Cooperation Fund and delivered by C-DAC, the agency under India’s electronics ministry. The project — just over US$1.1 million — is small money by trade-deal standards. It’s the design that matters. India supplied the equipment, the software and the course architecture; five Vietnamese master trainers spent six months at C-DAC Pune, with a second cohort following; and PTIT owns the centre, folding the courses into its own teaching.

This is not aid, and it is not services export. It is India helping a Vietnamese institution build the capacity to produce digital talent on its own — and the Centre’s mandate extends training to Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. For a US$1.1 million outlay, India has built a regional capability asset that carries its standards, its curriculum and its goodwill across four countries. Which line of the trade statistics captures that?

Thoothukudi: capability imported

Now let’s reverse the direction. In August 2025, Vietnam’s VinFast inaugurated its first plant outside Vietnam at the SIPCOT industrial park in Thoothukudi, Tamil Nadu — US$500 million initially, within a US$2 billion commitment, starting at 50,000 vehicles a year with room to reach 150,000. India’s EV market hardly needed rescuing: Tata Motors, Mahindra, Ather, TVS and Bajaj already shape it, and Maruti Suzuki’s e-Vitara is now on the road. So, the question is not whether India needs another entrant but instead what does each new entrant leave behind.

On that test, the early signals are worth watching. VinFast’s first 200 local hires — drawn largely from diploma students in the district — were trained by Vietnamese experts and Indian automotive professionals, in collaboration with Naan Mudhalvan, Tamil Nadu’s flagship skilling programme. The company has committed publicly to supplier localisation and technology transfer, and in December 2025 it signed a second-phase MoU — a further US$500 million and 500 acres for electric buses, e-scooters and charging infrastructure. If Thoothukudi remains an assembly shed, its value will be narrow. If the supplier development, the training pipeline and the engineering adaptation materialise, it becomes something more useful: an India–Vietnam capability compact.

The same compact, both ways

Put the two cases side by side and the pattern is hard to unsee. The architecture is identical — equipment plus people plus training plus local institutional ownership — whichever way the capability flows. A training centre in Ho Chi Minh City and a vehicle plant in Thoothukudi are the same instrument at different scales. Neither shows up in the deficit debate, because the deficit debate is running on a different ledger. Trade statistics record what crosses borders. They record nothing about whether either side is becoming more capable of building, training, innovating and producing.

The strategic question

The AITIGA review will conclude eventually, and India should bargain hard to strengthen the compact – not just trade, but capability. Without this underpinning, suppose the trade compact succeeds entirely — tariffs rebalanced, origin rules tightened, market access improved. Would the relationship then deliver what India and ASEAN need from each other? Only a capability ledger can answer that: how many institutions like the Ho Chi Minh City centre, how many investments held to the Thoothukudi standard, how many people trained, suppliers upgraded, problems solved jointly for markets both sides want to serve.

Trade measures what crosses borders. Capability measures what stays behind. India and ASEAN should start counting the second.

Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality

Dr Christopher Vas writes The Missing Middle IQ, a publication on the institutions that turn policy ambition into commercial reality across innovation driven economies. He is Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Canterbury and General Manager of the Food Innovation Precinct Western Australia, with over two decades of experience spanning industry policy, innovation and technology commercialisation.

The development

In late June, the Indian government allowed four Chinese power-equipment manufacturers with production facilities in India to participate in government tenders for critical power projects for a period of two years. The reason was straightforward: India faces supply constraints in transformers, bushings and other critical equipment, and the Central Electricity Authority indicated that this was a conscious decision to address those bottlenecks.

On one level, this is a narrow procurement intervention. On another, it is a revealing policy signal. India is showing that when domestic capability is not yet sufficient, selective access can be granted to firms that are already embedded in the local economy.

If the answer is only short-term supply relief, then India will have solved an immediate constraint without changing its long-term industrial position. But if that access is tied to local supplier development, workforce training, engineering adaptation and Indian-led product improvement, then the same decision starts to look like the foundation of a much more ambitious industrial strategy.

The ‘Capability Compact’

This is where the idea of a capability compact becomes useful. Economies need to move beyond a narrow fixation on free trade and think more carefully about how production capability is actually built. Market access should not be treated as an end in itself. It should be negotiated as a lever for deeper domestic capability: manufacturing, skills, suppliers, design and innovation.

India appears to be sketching such a model already in electronics. Dixon Technologies has become the clearest example. Its approved joint venture with Longcheer, Dixtel Infocomm, is structured at 74:26, with Dixon in control and the partnership explicitly tied to ODM expertise and localisation of non-semiconductor components. Another approved joint venture with HKC uses the same 74:26 structure for display modules. On the face of it they may just look like financial deals. However, they show India experimenting with a repeatable template: Indian majority control, Chinese technical depth, and an explicit effort to move beyond assembly into components and product development. The recently approved Dixon–Vivo assembly venture, at 51:49, shows the ceiling flexes where the objective is manufacturing volume rather than technology; where capability is being acquired, the pattern holds at 26.

The 26 per cent precedent

That is why 26 per cent is such a powerful number. It is not just the Chinese share in these new arrangements. It also echoes one of India’s most successful industrial partnerships. Suzuki’s original stake in Maruti Udyog in 1982 was 26 per cent. The government held 74 per cent, Suzuki 26 — the same split India’s new electronics ventures use today. India’s deepest industrial trust relationship began at exactly the number where its Chinese experiment is currently being capped.

The lesson is not that trust automatically follows structure. It is that structure can create the conditions for trust to emerge. And trust is the real missing infrastructure in India–China economic relations. Without it, collaboration remains transactional. With it, firms are more likely to share process know-how, build local supplier networks, train engineers deeply and treat India not just as a market, but as a co-development base.

Five pillars

This is why the compact should be framed around five pillars. First, local manufacturing milestones, so that participation is tied to measurable increases in Indian value addition. Second, Indian-majority operating structures, where appropriate, to ensure local strategic control. Third, specific technology-transfer obligations, defined in operational terms rather than left as vague promises. Fourth, training-provider integration from the start, bringing polytechnics, technical institutes and industry bodies into curriculum design and workforce development. Fifth, a joint product innovation platform — a commercially grounded mechanism that brings Indian and Chinese teams together to adapt products, solve Indian operating challenges, develop suppliers and generate innovations that can travel to other global markets.

From localisation to innovation

That fifth pillar is especially important. Localising Chinese technology in India should not be treated as the end of the process. It should be the start of a domino effect of innovation. Once products are adapted for India’s cost constraints, climate conditions, service environments and infrastructure realities, new knowledge begins to accumulate. That knowledge can shape better components, new maintenance models, more resilient product architectures and eventually products that are not only made in India but designed for the needs of other global markets as well.

Several existing partnerships already hint at this possibility. The four power-equipment firms now allowed into selected tenders can become more than stopgap suppliers if their participation is tied to localisation and workforce development. Haier’s manufacturing expansion shows how local production can deepen into component capability. Hisense’s partnership model in appliances suggests that Indian manufacturing platforms can be paired with foreign technical systems in ways that create export potential. Together with the Dixon cases, these examples suggest India is has already built fragments of a de facto capability compact.

The strategic question

The real task now is to say clearly what the country is already doing implicitly. India does not need to choose between economic openness and strategic caution. It needs to formalise a model in which access is conditional on learning, capability and trust. In that sense, the most important number in India’s evolving China policy may not be a tariff line, a production target or a bilateral trade figure. It may simply be 26 per cent.

Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality

Dr Christopher Vas writes The Missing Middle IQ, a publication on the institutions that turn policy ambition into commercial reality in India’s innovation economy. He is Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Canterbury and General Manager of the Food Innovation Precinct Western Australia, with over two decades of experience spanning industry policy, innovation and technology commercialisation.

A supply-chain problem, not a product problem

Europe’s electric transition is stalling on price.

The EU is effectively steering new‑car sales towards a predominantly electric mix by 2030 as a stepping stone to its 2035 near‑zero‑emission mandate but some independent forecasts put EV market share nearer 42% by then, with others ranging much higher, suggesting a risk of falling short of policy ambition.

Brussels has decided the missing ingredient is a genuinely affordable car.

Its answer is a proposed new regulatory category for small battery‑electric cars under roughly 4.2 metres in length, which politicians and industry increasingly frame as needing to land around €15,000–€20,000 to be genuinely affordable.

This is not a consumer-choice initiative; it is an industrial one. Europe is trying to manufacture the conditions — scale, suppliers, cost curves — under which an affordable EV becomes possible at all. The car is what we see but the supply chain is the main point.

The easy read — and why India should not rest on it

For India, this is more than a simple export opening. India is, with Japan, one of the few places that still designs profitably for the small, affordable car. Well over 90% of vehicles sold in India in FY2025 were priced below roughly ₹20 lakh, keeping the market anchored in the small, affordable segment.

Maruti Suzuki is already positioning India as an export base for compact EVs into Europe, with plants in Gujarat among those expected to serve European demand under the new trade framework. In August 2025, Maruti Suzuki commenced exports of Suzuki’s first battery‑electric vehicle, the e‑VITARA, shipping over 2,900 India‑built units from Pipavav Port in Gujarat to 12 European countries. The e‑VITARA is manufactured exclusively at Maruti Suzuki’s Gujarat facility, which Suzuki has positioned as the global production hub for its first BEV.

So, the conclusion may be misframed as Europe needs cheap small EVs, India makes them. Indian firms and policy strategy should not rest on it. If low cost were the whole contest, the winner would already be settled — and it would be China. China has frugal engineering and cost-down discipline in greater depth than anyone, and the battery and supply-chain scale to match. Any such rollout would still lean on Chinese‑sourced components like rare‑earth magnets, underlining Europe’s anxiety about swapping dependence on one geography for another.

India’s real asset is the relationship and terms on which it builds

So the case for India cannot be “switch from China to India.” It has to be about the terms on which capability is shared — and here India holds something genuinely different. India’s rise in automobiles was built on partnership: Maruti with Suzuki, and the long line of joint ventures and co-development deals that made the country an engineering and manufacturing base for global firms rather than a closed one.

From one perspective, China’s electric‑vehicle push looks like a drive for standalone dominance, whereas India’s instinct has historically been to build alongside partners. For Europe whose entire small-car project is a hedge against dependence, a partner that arrives willing to co-develop, localise and share — rather than to capture the market — is worth more than the one offering merely the lowest price.

The ask of Indian firms

None of this is charity, and Indian policymakers should not overstate the leverage. India is not ahead of Europe, still less of China, on the high-value core — battery cells, power electronics, and the critical minerals beneath them — where both India and Europe still depend, to varying degrees, on Chinese supply chains. That shared gap is exactly what makes collaboration rational rather than sentimental.

India’s edge is narrower and real — frugal vehicle engineering and a cost-disciplined component base that the India–EU trade agreement, once in force, will bring within tariff reach, with Indian duties on auto components set to fall to zero over five to ten years, and quota‑based EU tariff reductions eventually reaching zero for defined volumes of India‑made vehicles.

The task for Indian firms is to turn that access into co-development, not just consignments — and to invest now in the parts of the chain the window rewards, from cell manufacturing to power electronics and platform engineering. India’s own target of lifting EVs to about 30% of total vehicle sales by 2030, from only around 7–8% of sales in 2024, gives that build‑out a domestic reason quite apart from Europe. Most of that progress so far has come from two‑ and three‑wheelers and buses, while electric cars remain a small fraction of sales, underscoring how much room there is for growth in the passenger‑car segment.

The Boardroom Brief

Three questions worth putting to any Indian board weighing its European play:

• Are we positioning our European engagement as co-development and localisation, or as export consignments a lower-cost rival can undercut?

• Where in the value chain — cells, power electronics, platform engineering — are we investing to close the shared dependence on China, rather than competing on assembly cost alone?

• Does our willingness to build alongside partners, rather than capture the market, show up explicitly in how we present ourselves to European manufacturers and regulators — or are we leaving our clearest advantage hidden?

Dr Chris Vas writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.

The development. Agritech is the rare clean-tech category that cannot be offshored. A better-funded competitor abroad can build a cheaper battery or a denser solar cell and ship it into India. It cannot replicate India’s land, its labour, its existing agricultural base, or the monsoon-driven urgency that makes efficiency a matter of survival rather than margin. The assets that make Indian agritech defensible are precisely the ones a rival cannot buy. That is what the market misreads when it prices “agriculture” as legacy and low-margin: the defensibility is the asset.

Let’s start with the obvious tool. Drones are now the clearest example of a technology that delivers efficiency and decarbonisation in the same motion. They cut crop damage, reduce labour, and — critically — apply fertiliser and pesticide with a precision that manual spraying cannot match. Research that informs precision-farming policy suggests targeted application can reduce nitrogen fertiliser use substantially. Fertiliser-related nitrous oxide emissions remain one of agriculture’s largest sources of greenhouse gases. A drone framed as a productivity tool is, without relabelling, a clean-tech tool.

India has understood this at the level of policy. The Namo Drone Didi scheme, with an outlay of ₹1,261 crore, set out to put 15,000 drones into the hands of women-led self-help groups by 2025-26, backed by an 80 per cent subsidy and a domestic manufacturing base. The ambition is genuine and the design is thoughtful — training, financing, and a rental model that builds rural enterprise around the technology.

The surface implication. The ambition has outrun the absorption infrastructure. Government data to early 2026 records roughly 1,000 drones distributed against that 15,000 target — under a tenth of the way, with the scheme window nearly closed. The shortfall is not a failure of intent or funding. The friction is logistical: transport and servicing gaps, training-to-deployment pipelines that lag procurement, and uneven implementation across states. Where coordination has been strong — Karnataka is the standout, with trained pilots already servicing thousands of hectares — the model works and pays. Karnataka has the highest number of women self‑help group (145 SHGs) under the Namo Drone Didi Yojana, making it the leading state on this dimension of the scheme, while Punjab and Madhya Pradesh have among the largest allocations of drones under Namo Drone Didi. Clearly, the technology is never the binding constraint. The capacity to absorb it is.

Policy and capital are necessary but not sufficient. Technology adoption rests on a substrate that no subsidy can manufacture directly: the trusted intermediary and the web of working relationships through which a tool actually reaches the field. India’s self-help groups are not merely a delivery channel for the Drone Didi scheme — they are that substrate, the organisational relationality on which adoption depends. The sequencing matters. Capital and policy set the conditions; the relational layer determines whether anything is absorbed. Build the funding before the trust and the drones sit idle; build the trust first and the same capital goes further.

Drones matter not because they are the most important agritech category, but because they reveal a broader institutional pattern. Where adoption stalls, the constraint is rarely the technology itself. It is the ecosystem required to absorb it.

India is good at announcing technology missions and less practised at building the unglamorous machinery — hubs, servicing networks, skills pipelines — that turns a subsidy into deployment at scale. The clean-tech bet India already owns is stranded not by capital but by absorption.

The timing matters. India’s corporate sustainability reporting requirements, growing export exposure to sustainability standards, and increasing scrutiny of Scope 3 emissions are pushing agritech from a farm-level productivity issue into a strategic supply-chain issue.

Watching from Australia. Western Australia sat in almost exactly this position two years ago. Agri-drone adoption was poor; the technology existed but the ecosystem to use it did not. Today, agricultural drone adoption in Western Australia has accelerated rapidly, supported by training, demonstration programs, servicing capability and stronger operator networks. This year the Food Innovation Precinct WA launched a dedicated drone technology hub and the Aerial Futures initiative — a deliberate move, as the precinct put it, from awareness to application. The hub demonstrates advanced systems in real-world settings, runs training programmes, and connects local operators to a global network through a Tier-1 DJI partnership. The lesson is not that WA has more drones. It is that WA has continued to build the ecosystem for adoption to take place.

That is the missing institutional layer, and it is exactly the one a technology-transfer bridge can supply. There are already examples of what this institutional bridge looks like. The Australia–India Rapid Innovation and Startup Expansion (RISE) accelerator helps mature technologies adapt across both markets, reducing the cost of rediscovering solutions independently. Its value lies less in the technology itself than in the intermediary function it performs. The model India needs is not another mission. It is the absorption infrastructure that lets the missions it already has actually land.

The Boardroom Brief

The strategic question. For a food or beverage company, the largest share of emissions and the deepest source of water and input risk sits upstream — in the fields of suppliers, not in owned operations. Scope 3 is where the exposure lives, and the field is where it is either managed or ignored.

This reframes agritech from a productivity story into a supply-chain accountability one. A drone that applies fertiliser precisely, a sensing platform that models soil health, a water technology that de-risks a stressed catchment — each is a lever a corporate buyer can put into its supplier base to lower upstream emissions and input dependence at once. Large players have started: programmes such as Cargill’s SustainConnect help farmers use remote sensing and soil-health modelling to reduce their carbon footprint. The question is no longer whether the tools exist. It is whether the companies that depend on Indian agriculture are doing the unglamorous work of getting them adopted — which, as the Drone Didi experience shows, runs through trusted intermediaries and relationships, not procurement alone.

Three questions a board with an agricultural supply base should be able to answer:

· How much of our Scope 3 footprint originates in the farming practices of our suppliers — fertiliser, water, soil — and are we treating that as an operational risk we manage, or one we simply report?

· Are we engaging our supplier base on input efficiency and clean-tech adoption directly, or assuming that government schemes and the farmers themselves will close the gap without us?

· Where adoption stalls, do we know whether the binding constraint is capital, capability, or the absence of a trusted intermediary through which a technology can actually reach the field — and are we positioned to invest in that relational layer rather than wait for it?

The bet is already in the ground. The question for any company that buys from India’s farms is whether it helps build the infrastructure to harvest it — or watches a competitor secure the supply chain first.

Dr Chris Vas writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.

Earlier this month, Chitkara University in Punjab formally launched an Atal Incubation Centre focused on drone technologies, agritech and renewable energy — up to ₹20 crore over five years, funded jointly by the university and the Atal Innovation Mission. The launch framed its ambition as a seamless pathway from school-level tinkering labs to startup incubation.

It joins a system that has quietly reached scale. The Atal Innovation Mission’s official list now records more than 80 incubation centres across the country. India’s universities host roughly two-thirds of the country’s Atal incubation centres, yet perform only 8.8 per cent of national R&D. India has placed much of its commercialisation infrastructure inside institutions that undertake relatively little of the research they are expected to commercialise.

The surface reading

On the surface, this is the innovation pipeline completing itself. Ten thousand school tinkering labs feed university incubators; incubators feed the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem. A university that hosts an incubation centre can reasonably feel it has done its part for national technology missions.

What the numbers say — and don’t

At first glance, 8.8 per cent looks surprisingly low. Internationally, however, university shares vary far less than many assume. The much larger difference lies elsewhere: who performs the rest of the nation’s research.

India’s university share resembles China, South Korea and the United States. That similarity, however, masks profoundly different innovation systems. The story is in the other two columns. In every other country on this list, companies perform between half and four-fifths of national research, and government performs somewhere between 6 and 14 per cent. India inverts this: half of all research happens inside government, and business carries about 41 per cent of a much smaller total.

Thus, the surprise is not India’s universities. It is its government. Most advanced innovation systems rely on business to perform most research. India remains one of the few large economies where government laboratories still perform roughly half of all national R&D. It sits almost entirely at the Centre — State governments perform under 7 per cent of national research — and within the Centre, in the mission agencies and laboratory chains built after independence: defence, space and atomic energy, alongside the CSIR and agricultural institute networks. This is a deliberate inheritance.

India chose to build its research capacity inside government laboratories rather than inside universities or firms. The recent space reforms hint at what that stock could become when opened up: a fast-growing private space industry, seeded in part by technology transferred out of ISRO. Space reform suggests that government laboratories need not remain permanent performers of research; they can become suppliers of technology to competitive firms. It is worth asking which other government research divisions could be spun into joint ventures with private industry on the same logic — converting research the State performs into capability the market can carry.

The missing runway

Incubation answers one question: how does an idea become a company? National missions stumble on a different one: how does a working technology reach its first real deployment? Innovation policy often assumes the hard part is inventing technology. In reality, many technologies fail after they work. Between a successful prototype and a bankable project sits unglamorous work — field trials in real conditions, performance validation someone will vouch for, certification, demonstration sites a customer can walk through, operators trained in numbers. Call it the runway: everything a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) project needs before anyone will finance the second.

India’s support system thins out exactly there. The Atal New India Challenge — the mission’s deepest instrument for commercialisation — funds prototype-stage ventures at up to ₹1 crore. The Technology Development Board has begun funding projects beyond the prototype stage, but funding a first deployment and having somewhere to prove it are different problems. A green hydrogen electrolyser, a new solar module chemistry, a grid storage design: each needs land, instruments, qualified people and a credible referee before capital will commit. Startups cannot afford that infrastructure. Ministries cannot staff it. Universities can — they hold land, laboratories, students who need exactly this training, and a neutrality no vendor enjoys.

What a runway mandate would look like

For a vice-chancellor: the question is no longer whether to host an incubator — eighty campuses already do. It is whether the university’s land and laboratories are organised as places where new technologies get proven at commercial scale: trial networks, testbeds, demonstration facilities that companies pay to use. Universities occupy a rare institutional position. They are trusted by government, accessible to startups, sufficiently neutral for industry to collaborate, and possess land, laboratories and skilled people that already exist. Few other institutions combine all four. An incubator is measured by startups admitted; a runway is measured by technologies that leave, validated. India has invested heavily in incubation infrastructure. It has invested very little in deployment infrastructure.

For the mission and its ministries: the incubation network is built — the design question now is whether the next generation of sector-focused centres carries a runway mandate, funded and evaluated as deployment infrastructure rather than as more incubation. Ten universities with certification testbeds in mission sectors would do more for first deployments than thirty more general-purpose incubators.

For industry: the runway is where India’s cautious capital learns. Indian investors and companies are often criticised for avoiding primary research and early technology — but capital rarely backs what it has never watched work. Demonstration sites and testbeds are where that changes: places where executives, lenders and corporate technology teams see a technology perform under real conditions. The eighty incubation centres, and any runway built beside them, need industry inside them — business champions mentoring ventures, technical advisory seats, first-customer agreements. Every executive who spends time on the runway is one fewer investor for whom deep technology is an unknowable risk.

The strategic question

India asked its universities to host the start of the innovation pipeline, and they did. The question that will decide whether national missions reach the field is whether anyone asks them to build the end of it.

India has spent the past decade teaching universities how to create startups. The next decade may depend on teaching them how to de-risk technologies.

Incubators create companies. Runways create industries.

Dr Chris Vas writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.

A long argument in economics has quietly ended, and it ended in Paris. For decades, the OECD — the club of the world’s richest economies — was known for warning governments against picking winners. In June, it published its first Industrial Policy Handbook. The question the Handbook answers is not whether governments should support industry. It is how to do it well. The OECD’s entire annual ministerial meeting, attended by all 38 member governments, was devoted to the same theme.

The most striking material, though, was in the numbers published alongside it. The OECD measured every industrial support scheme across twenty OECD member countries— every subsidy, grant and tax break for industry — across twenty of its member countries. Roughly three-quarters of the schemes running in 2023 were already running in 2019, even after setting aside pandemic-era measures. In any given year, a scheme has only around a 4 per cent chance of being shut down. At that rate, by the OECD’s own projection, half of the schemes running today will still be running in 2041.

That is the hangover the world’s richest economies are starting to nurse. It is not a spending binge — support grew only modestly, from 1.34 to 1.55 per cent of GDP over five years. The problem is that support, once given, almost never ends. The OECD’s own analysts add two uncomfortable details: the money often tends to flow to industries that are losing ground, not gaining it, and less than a fifth of it goes to research and development. Schemes created to change an economy’s direction end up defending its past.

The surface reading

From New Delhi, all this can read as vindication. India moved early and at scale: production-linked incentives across fourteen sectors, a Semiconductor Mission, a ₹1 lakh crore research and innovation fund. If the world’s referee now says government support is legitimate, India was ahead of the whistle.

But the OECD data is not a scoreboard. It is a preview of what India’s own collection of schemes will look like in twenty years if nothing changes. Every government shares the same instincts: extend a scheme rather than evaluate it, top up an unspent fund rather than ask why the money is not moving. The data shows what those instincts add up to over two decades.

America has just shown the opposite way to fail. One year after Washington rolled back its clean energy tax credits, E2 and BW researchers counted 216 large clean energy projects cancelled, closed or scaled back — roughly $68 billion in private investment abandoned, and by their estimates close to 470,000 jobs that will now never exist. So industrial policy fails at both ends. Support that can never be switched off breeds dependence. Support that can be switched off overnight destroys the investment built on it.

The institutions that earned their permanence

The easy conclusion is that every scheme should come with an expiry date. But the most admired industrial institutions in the world argue against it — because they are old. Germany’s Fraunhofer research institutes date to 1949. America’s DARPA, the defence agency that seeded the internet and GPS, to 1958. Taiwan’s ITRI, the institute that created TSMC and featured in last week’s piece, to 1973.

Look closer, and each one has expiry built in — just not where you would expect. Every DARPA programme has an end date, and its programme managers serve fixed terms and then leave. The agency lasts precisely because nothing inside it does. Fraunhofer institutes get only about a third of their budget from government; the rest they must earn by selling research to companies, year after year. If industry stops buying, the institute shrinks. And ITRI measures success by what leaves the building — the technology, the people, the companies it spins out.

The lesson is simple. In these systems, the institution is permanent and the schemes expire. The OECD’s 2041 projection suggests many governments have become better at creating industrial policy than retiring or redesigning it. The world’s best industrial systems distinguish between three things: temporary policy instruments, evolving strategic missions, and enduring institutions. Confusing one for another is where industrial policy begins to lose its discipline.

Keep the institution. Put the deadline on the money.

Should India fund its intermediary institutions as temporary vehicles, created for one strategy and dissolved when it ends? Occasionally, yes — a single, sharply defined mission can justify a body built to disband. But as a habit, it repeats America’s mistake in slow motion. Skill and judgement take years to build and vanish the day the institution closes. And talented people do not join organisations designed to die.

Thus, not every intermediary should become permanent. Governments sometimes need institutions built for a single mission. But making impermanence the default creates a different problem. Capability takes years to accumulate and can disappear overnight when institutions are repeatedly dismantled and rebuilt.

The better design puts the deadline on the money, not the institution. Build bodies that last long enough to get good at the job. But make everything they administer — funding windows, appointments, scheme extensions — expire on a fixed date, and force it to be won back against a published review of what it actually achieved. India’s new RDI Fund could adopt this tomorrow: appoint its fund managers for fixed terms, renewable only on results, and extend schemes only after an honest evaluation rather than by default.

One warning. None of this can be achieved by costume. Announcing an “Indian DARPA” or an “Indian Fraunhofer” imports a name, not a way of working. The real tests are practical ones. Can it pay salaries that attract top engineers? Can its programmes actually be shut down? Do its reviews have consequences? An institution that fails those tests is not a Fraunhofer. It is a government department in a familiar bureaucracy behind an imported label.

The strategic question

The OECD countries must now impose exit discipline on more than two thousand live schemes, each with defenders. India’s newest institutions are young enough to be born with it. Which is the greater advantage — having built first, or building last, with the evidence in hand?

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The Boardroom Brief

The 2041 finding is not only a problem for governments. Companies build strategy on top of policy, and a scheme that either never ends or ends overnight passes both risks straight into the business. Three questions for the next strategy discussion.

1. Which of our investment cases assume a scheme is permanent — and which assume it will survive the next election? Both assumptions now carry price tags. The OECD data says schemes usually persist; the American data says the exceptions are brutal. Boards should know which of their approved investments rest on each assumption, and what the business looks like if that assumption breaks.

2. If the schemes we benefit from were reviewed and re-opened to competition tomorrow, would we welcome it? A company that would pass that test is using policy as a bridge to real competitiveness. A company that would quietly dread it has become competitive against the subsidy, not the market — and is exposed to exactly the reform this article argues India should adopt.

3. Would we pay for the institutions we say India lacks? Fraunhofer works because German companies buy two-thirds of its budget in contract research. That is the honest test for any Indian equivalent — and for corporate sincerity. Boards that want technology translation, pilot facilities and supplier development should name what they would pay for at commercial rates. If the answer is nothing, the institution being demanded is a costume. If the answer is something, that demand is the strongest foundation a serious institution could be built on.

Dr Chris Vas writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality

India’s flagship innovation fund has encountered an unexpected bottleneck—not funding, but institutional capacity.Budget documents released in February showed that of the ₹20,000 crore allocated to the Research, Development and Innovation Fund for FY26, only about ₹3,000 crore had been deployed by the time revised estimates were prepared. The reason given was administrative rather than financial: only two Second-Level Fund Managers — BIRAC and the Technology Development Board — had been appointed to disburse it. The selection process for further fund managers has already seen its deadlines extended, and firms without a relationship to an empanelled SLFM cannot access the capital, whatever the quality of their technology.

The Budget responded by topping the fund up with another ₹20,000 crore for FY27.

The surface reading

The commentary forming around this treats it as an absorption problem. Venture investors are unfamiliar with deep tech. The ecosystem is immature. Risk capital at India’s stage of development is scarce — a point Neelkanth Mishra has made on the record, noting that at India’s per-capita wealth there is simply not enough risk appetite in the economy to fund frontier technology at scale.

All of this is broadly true. None of it is new. And a country facing exactly this situation — no risk capital, no experienced investors, no industrial technology companies worth the name — has already shown what the answer looks like. It was not a fund.

What Taiwan actually built

In 1976, Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute, then three years old, signed a technology transfer agreement with the American firm RCA for a mature CMOS chipmaking process. The selection criterion is worth pausing on: RCA won the contract over more advanced rivals largely because it was the most willing to teach. Taiwan deliberately chose a partner that would maximise learning rather than minimise cost.

ITRI embedded dozens of young engineers in RCA’s American plants for months at a time, covering wafer fabrication, mask design, testing, packaging — and the unglamorous management practice that surrounds them.

By late 1977, ITRI’s small demonstration factory in Hsinchu was producing chips at yields that matched, and by some accounts exceeded, RCA’s own American plants.

Then came the step India’s current architecture has no equivalent for. In 1980, ITRI spun the demonstration factory’s technology and its team out as a company — United Microelectronics Corporation. No private investor wanted in; venture capital did not yet exist in Taiwan. So the government funded the launch, pressed the banks to participate, stayed out of management, and later sold its shares entirely.

Seven years later, ITRI did it again at larger scale. It had recruited Morris Chang from the United States to run the institute, and when Texas Instruments and Intel declined to back his foundry concept, Philips signed on — US$58 million, production technology and licensed intellectual property for a stake of around 27 per cent. ITRI transferred a fabrication facility, its equipment, its technology portfolio, and 98 of its own professionals into the new company. That company was TSMC.

Nor was TSMC an isolated success. Over subsequent decades ITRI played central roles in the development of companies including Taiwan Mask Corporation, Mirle Automation and numerous semiconductor equipment, materials and electronics firms. The institution became a repeatable mechanism for industrial upgrading rather than a one-off intervention.

The missing form

Notice what ITRI was not. It was not a fund. It did not appraise applications or set hurdle rates. It was an operating institution: it acquired technology from abroad, absorbed it into its own engineers, matured it on its own production lines, and then exited — transferring people, machines and intellectual property together into companies designed to outgrow it. The institution’s success was measured by what left the building.

India’s two-level fund architecture inverts this. Capital flows from the ANRF to Second-Level Fund Managers to firms. Every layer in the chain allocates money. No layer is designed to operate, mature or demonstrate technology. The architecture assumes that somewhere below the SLFMs, institutions already exist that can do what ITRI did — absorb foreign technology, de-risk it through the pilot stage, and hand it to firms ready to compete globally. The deployment numbers suggest that assumption is doing a great deal of unexamined work.

This is not an argument that the RDI Fund has failed. It is eight months old, its first batch of fund managers has been identified, and selection of venture and private equity managers is under way. It is an argument about what the fund is waiting for. Taiwan’s lesson is that the thing missing beneath a capital stack is rarely more capital.

ANRF has an important mandate: strengthening India’s research ecosystem and financing discovery. That role matters. But Taiwan’s experience suggests that funding research and translating research into globally competitive firms are distinct institutional functions. ITRI was created to perform the latter.

The strategic question

Which institution in India’s current architecture is designed to play ITRI’s role — and if the answer is none, who is supposed to build it?

The Boardroom Brief

Taiwan’s experience carries one discipline worth underlining before the questions: ITRI was built to exit. The demonstration factory was wound down once its work was done, the government sold out of UMC, and the institute’s people left with the companies they created. Any Indian equivalent would need the same sunset logic designed in from the start — an operating institution that is permanent becomes a competitor to the industry it was meant to create.

For directors of Indian companies in industrial and deep technology sectors, three questions follow.

1. If your company sought RDI Fund capital tomorrow, which SLFM would you approach — and what would that intermediary actually know about your technology? The two appointed fund managers are financing bodies. Neither operates laboratories, pilot lines or engineering teams in your sector. Boards should assess whether the appraisal they would face is a technology appraisal or a credit appraisal wearing different language, and what that means for how proposals should be constructed.

2. What is your company’s equivalent of the RCA contract? Taiwan’s decisive move was not inventing CMOS; it was buying comprehensive teaching rights to a mature process and embedding its engineers inside the seller’s operations. Boards weighing technology acquisition should ask whether proposed licensing arrangements transfer capability — people trained, processes mastered, yields proven — or merely permission.

3. If government were to stand up an ITRI-like operating institution in your sector, would your company be a customer, a co-developer, or a bystander? ITRI worked because Taiwan’s firms absorbed its output — its people, its spin-outs, its process knowledge. An Indian equivalent would need companies prepared to receive technology, not just capital. Boards should consider what receiving capability would require of their own engineering organisation, and whether that capacity exists today.

India’s innovation debate often asks who should finance the next TSMC. Taiwan asked a different question first: who should build the institution capable of creating one?

Dr Chris Vas writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.

But there is a second number that sits uneasily beside the first. By one widely cited estimate from TeamLease, only around one in ten engineering graduates ultimately secure employment in core engineering roles. The rest are absorbed elsewhere — into adjacent roles, into work far below their training, or into a long wait for it. The framing that best captures this is not a shortage of talent. It is a crisis of alignment.

That distinction matters because it changes what the headline number means. A pipeline is an input, not an outcome. Producing 1.5 million engineers tells you what the education system emits; it tells you almost nothing about how much engineering capability the economy actually acquires. And the gap between those two things — between graduates produced and engineers deployed — is where a demographic dividend is either banked or quietly lost.

This is the same pattern that runs beneath India’s manufacturing story. A record smartphone export figure confirmed that assembly volume had arrived, but said nothing about whether upstream capability followed. The graduate number is the human-capital version of exactly that confusion: volume at the entry stage, mistaken for capability at the productive stage. In both cases the abundance is real and the conversion layer is thin.

The reasons are, by now, well understood — and they were put bluntly by Vishwa Mohan, founder of upGrad’s School of Technology and a former engineer at Amazon, LinkedIn and Oracle, on a recent industry podcast. His diagnosis is that the conventional engineering degree is built around generalisation: a computer-science student, on his account, spends a large share of their time on material only loosely related to their field, graduating broad but under-specialised. Curricula lag the technologies industry is actually hiring for — he argues that much of what is taught as “data science” or “machine learning” is several years out of date, and that genuinely current material is barely taught anywhere in the country. And the people teaching it, even at strong institutions, are often researchers who have rarely written production code — able to train the next academic, less able to train a deployable engineer.

The result is an economy where the conversion from graduate to productive engineer happens after graduation, at the employer’s expense. India’s largest IT firms run some of the world’s biggest corporate training operations precisely because fresh hires routinely need months of additional preparation before they are useful. The education system optimises for producing degrees; the economy needs deployed engineers; and very little institutional machinery sits in between to convert one into the other. That gap is the missing middle of India’s talent story.

It is, however, buildable — and some of it is being built. Mohan’s own model is an instructive example of the form the fix takes: rather than offering a shortcut around the degree, it partners with universities across India’s tech hubs to deliver an accredited engineering degree taught the way industry works — practitioners teaching alongside academics, application-led from the first semester, judged on working code and portfolios rather than examination marks.

The implication is not that every university should become vocational. Research universities and broad engineering education remain essential. But a system producing 1.5 million engineers also needs institutions dedicated to the conversion task — industry-led curricula, degree apprenticeships, employer-designed assessment, faculty with current industry experience, and boundary-spanning organisations that continuously translate labour-market demand into educational supply.

The design principle is the right one: the absorption layer between education and employment has to be deliberately engineered, not assumed into existence. It echoes, in a different register, what Malaysia did decades ago when it built industry-governed skills institutions around its Penang electronics cluster — capability tied to the specific firms that would absorb it. Employers helped shape curricula, apprenticeships and assessment, reducing the distance between graduation and productive employment.

The honest qualifier is scale. Models like this, together with the broader growth of apprenticeships, degree-apprenticeship pathways and in-house training by global capability centres, still reach a small fraction of the 1.5 million engineers entering the system each year. The proof of concept exists; the institutional density to deliver it across the whole pipeline does not. That is the actual work of converting a demographic dividend into one — unglamorous, slow, and institutional, rather than a matter of producing more graduates.

Which returns to where the numbers started. Mohan’s own framing of India’s advantage is that, where some countries have oil or capital as their endowment, India’s is human — a “venture capital of people.” But venture capital only produces a return when it is deployed into something that compounds. A pipeline of 1.5 million engineers is the raw endowment. Whether it compounds depends entirely on the institutions built between the lecture hall and the job — and on present evidence, that layer is being built at the edges, not yet at the scale the claim of a dividend requires.

The number India celebrates describes its supply of talent. The number that will decide its future is the share of that talent the economy actually puts to work at the level it was trained for. A demographic dividend is not about how many young people a country has. It is something that must be converted into productive capability.

Dr Chris Vas writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.

But there is a more important question hidden beneath the statistic: What exactly has India learned from exporting US$58.6 billion worth of high-tech goods?

The answer matters, because high‑tech exports and high‑tech capability are not necessarily the same thing. A smartphone qualifies as a high‑tech export, yet much of the value inside it originates elsewhere. The display may come from South Korea, the sensors from Japan, the chips from Taiwan, and the manufacturing equipment from the Netherlands, while the core intellectual property may be owned in California. India’s contribution has increasingly been the final assembly, testing and integration of these components into a finished product.

This should not be dismissed. Assembly is not a weakness — it is often the first stage of industrial capability. The mistake is assuming assembly is the destination rather than the starting point. And whether a country makes that mistake is not a matter of intention; it is a matter of what it builds next.

Two countries that took this same position before India show the two ways it can go.

Vietnam is the warning. A decade ago, Vietnam ran almost exactly India’s playbook: anchor a giant — Samsung — win the assembly mandate, and ride it to roughly US$150 billion in electronics exports, about a third of everything it sells abroad. By volume, it became one of the world’s largest phone exporters. Then the climb stalled. The share of locally sourced inputs in Vietnamese electronics still sits at around 15 to 20 per cent, and by some expert estimates the genuine localisation rate is closer to 5 to 10 per cent. Of the roughly 340 domestic firms inside Samsung’s supplier network, only about three dozen are tier‑one suppliers; most supply packaging, printing and consumables, not core components. Vietnam now has a name for the thing it is trying to escape: the “assembly trap”. The export scale arrived; the supplier depth did not follow automatically.

Malaysia is the method. The country has been in semiconductors for roughly fifty years and did move upstream: it holds about 13 per cent of the world’s chip assembly, testing and packaging market, and in 2024 launched a National Semiconductor Strategy that explicitly sequences the climb from assembly toward integrated‑circuit design, advanced packaging and equipment. But the instructive part is how unfinished the climb remains. On the newest high‑value rung — advanced packaging, the step that matters most in the AI era — Malaysian industry leaders describe local capability bluntly: “Malaysia is at zero. Nothing.” Fifty years in, the next rung still has to be climbed deliberately, which is why five local firms have pooled into a single consortium targeting 7 per cent of the global advanced‑packaging market by 2035.

The lesson is not that India should copy either country. It is that successful industrialisation rarely happens in a single leap. Countries move through stages: assembly creates production experience; production experience creates supplier capability; supplier capability creates engineering expertise; engineering expertise creates design capability; design capability creates intellectual property; and intellectual property creates strategic advantage. Vietnam got the first stage and assumed the rest would accrue. Malaysia is showing that each stage has to be built on purpose.

India’s smartphone boom has successfully accelerated that first stage. Production-linked incentives have drawn investment, expanded capacity and made India a credible node in global electronics supply chains. The next stage is harder, because it means moving upstream — owning more of what sits inside the phone: printed-circuit assemblies, camera modules, sensors, battery technologies, electronics materials, embedded software, testing infrastructure and specialised manufacturing equipment.

Here the debate becomes uncomfortable. Governments can subsidise factories, offer tax incentives and attract multinationals. What they cannot easily do is create the ecosystem that converts manufacturing activity into technological learning. That requires industry-led research partnerships, technology roadmaps, pilot facilities, supplier-development programmes, specialised workforce training and innovation intermediaries capable of connecting firms, researchers and investors. In other words, it requires attention to the missing middle between production and innovation — the layer Vietnam never built and Malaysia is still building.

India’s smartphone success deserves to be celebrated; it is a real industrial achievement. But the strategic question has changed. It is no longer whether India can assemble the world’s products; it is whether India can progressively own more of the technologies embedded inside them. The US$58.6 billion statistic confirms India has entered the game. The next decade will determine whether it merely assembles the future — or helps design it.

Dr Chris Vas writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.

India has decided that electric vehicles are a strategic bet worth making. The incentives are in place, adoption targets are set, and domestic manufacturers are investing heavily. In my last post, I argued that EVs are precisely the kind of sector where India’s advantage lies—not in inventing frontier technology, but in scaling proven technology across a vast domestic market. It is a classic 1-to-100 opportunity. The harder question is not whether India should make the bet. It is whether India will build the thing that determines if the bet pays off: the supplier ecosystem beneath the vehicle.

That question is easier to answer with two cautionary examples in view. Europe and China set out on the same transition and diverged sharply — and the reason they diverged is the single most useful lesson available to Indian policymakers and boards right now.

Start with the diagnosis usually offered for Europe’s troubles: speed. Regulators are moving too slowly. The framework for small affordable EVs will not be finalised until 2027. The pathway to the 2035 phase-out remains contested. The rules keep changing. Speed matters — but it is not the real story. Europe is not being overtaken simply because China is faster. It is being overtaken because China has executed against a remarkably consistent strategic direction while Europe continues to renegotiate the pathway. Automotive investments in manufacturing, batteries and supply chains are measured in decades. They require stable assumptions, not revisions every electoral cycle.

China’s advantage was never just lower costs or larger subsidies. It spent more than a decade building the battery, component and materials ecosystem that sits beneath the vehicle. Europe focused on the car. China built the supply chain. That is the distinction India must internalise, because the EV race is increasingly won not at the showroom floor but in the supplier ecosystem — and that is exactly the layer a 1-to-100 strategy depends on.

The development. Scale is not manufactured in the final vehicle. It is manufactured in the components. Battery cells, power electronics, semiconductors and specialised materials determine whether costs fall quickly enough for mass adoption to occur. For a country pursuing a 1-to-100 strategy, the supplier ecosystem is not a downstream consideration. It is the economic proposition.

This is where Europe’s experience becomes instructive rather than merely interesting. The European debate over small affordable EVs matters because these vehicles are the mechanism through which a market generates volume — and volume is what drives cost down and supply chains deep. Europe has largely held its destination steady: a zero-emissions fleet by 2035. What it has not held steady is the pathway. Subsidy adjustments, regulatory revisions and affordability debates have repeatedly altered the route by which industry is expected to arrive. For investors committing capital over fifteen-year horizons, the pathway matters almost as much as the target. China, by contrast, sustained its direction — battery manufacturing, charging infrastructure, local-procurement preferences and industrial clustering held broadly stable across multiple planning cycles, which is why firms such as BYD and CATL could invest against a decade-long horizon. China’s advantage is not speed. It is consistency.

India now sits between these two models, and the position is more precarious than it looks. India must combine Europe’s standards with China’s discipline while avoiding the weaknesses of both — policy ambition that cannot hold its settings still, and execution that scales without regard to the standards that make an industry worth building. The danger is to legislate ambition while neglecting the harder work of building the capability required to deliver it.

The surface implication. India is already running a gentler version of Europe’s experiment, on both fault lines. On the demand side, incentives have evolved from the Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles (FAME) through to the what is now the PM Electric-DRIVE. The direction has held; the settings have not, shifting often enough to leave manufacturers, dealers and investors absorbing the uncertainty. That is Europe’s inconstancy in miniature, and it is correctable — the cure is simply to hold the settings still long enough for industry to commit.

The more serious fault line is upstream. India’s Advanced Chemistry Cell programme targeted 50 GWh of domestic battery-cell manufacturing capacity by 2026. By late 2025, less than 3 per cent of India’s targeted 50 GWh ACC capacity had been commissioned. The constraint was not ambition or subsidy. It was the absence of the upstream ecosystem — critical-mineral processing, cathode and anode materials, separators and other specialised inputs that remain heavily dependent on imports. India attempted to build cells before fully building the industrial layers beneath them. This is not a failure. It is a warning, and it is the same warning Europe is now receiving in a louder register: industrial ecosystems cannot be legislated into existence. They must be built.

Europe’s own response shows what not to do. Faced with Chinese competition, parts of the continent have reached for “Made in Europe” content rules — requiring, say, 70 per cent local content as a condition of market access. Set aside the definitional problem of how you measure such a threshold. The deeper issue is that Europe’s supply chain cannot currently meet it, so the only plausible outcome is Chinese suppliers relocating production into Europe over many years while costs rise across the system, demand falls, and consumers drift back toward used combustion vehicles. Protection applied before capability exists becomes a tax on the transition itself. India, with a thinner ecosystem still, would feel that tax harder.

The clearest evidence comes from the industry itself. Renault’s chief executive François Provost recently argued that Europe should encourage Chinese manufacturers to source components locally, noting that roughly 95 per cent of the value generated around vehicle assembly resides with suppliers, not final assembly. The value, and the resilience, of the industry live in that middle layer — yet policy debates fixate on final-assembly plants because they are politically visible. The supplier ecosystem is less visible. It is also far more important. For India, that is the whole strategic point: the bet is won or lost in the layer the headlines ignore.

So the objective for India is not to replicate China’s entire ecosystem, nor to make everything at home. The winners in industrial policy are rarely those who try to do everything; they are those who identify a limited number of domains where domestic demand, industrial capability and strategic value intersect. For India, those domains may include battery packs, power electronics, vehicle software, charging infrastructure and the electrification of two- and three-wheelers — segments where the country already holds genuine scale advantages. China built everything. Europe is now trying to protect everything. India’s opportunity is to choose, deliberately, what it intends to be world-class at.

Watching from Australia. The temptation to legislate an ecosystem into existence is one Australia knows well. We have the lithium, the rare earths and the critical minerals the entire battery supply chain depends on, and a recurring ambition to move “beyond digging it up” into processing and cells. The lesson of the past decade is that the endowment is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. Refining capacity, technical skills and stable offtake signals have to be built patiently and held steady—and where the signals wavered, the capability did not arrive. Australia discovered that owning the mineral is not the same as owning the industry. India would do well to absorb that lesson before learning it the expensive way.

The Boardroom Brief

The strategic question. If EVs are a sector where India’s play is to scale from 1-to-100, then the supplier ecosystem is not a downstream detail — it is the entire bet. Scale is manufactured in components, and a board’s exposure to India’s EV transition is ultimately exposure to whether that middle layer gets built.

That reframes the imported-versus-made decision. Treating cells and components as a procurement line to source at lowest cost is rational for any single firm and collectively corrosive to the capability the country is trying to build. The same dynamic that has left India’s battery-cell target largely unmet — everyone importing the upstream because no one alone can justify building it — is the coordination problem that policy, patient capital and anchor demand exist to solve.

Three questions a board should be able to answer:

1. Are we treating India’s EV component and battery ecosystem as a procurement function to minimise cost, or as a strategic capability whose absence creates long-term risk?

2. Where our investments depend on policy support, have we stress-tested them against future changes in incentives, tariffs or local-content rules — and are we building on the parts of the framework that have proven durable rather than those most likely to be renegotiated?

3. Which limited set of EV-related capabilities should India — and our organisation within it — genuinely seek to dominate, and where are we better served partnering with or depending on others?

The EV transition will not be won by whoever writes the rules fastest, nor by whoever builds the highest wall. It will be won by whoever builds the capability beneath the ambition—and holds course long enough for that capability to compound.

Unlike Europe, India is still early enough in its EV transition that the supplier ecosystem has not yet been locked in. The choices made over the next five years will determine whether India becomes a large EV market or a large EV industry.

Note: This post has been informed by insights shared with Professor Enzo Bagileri of the SDA Bocconi School of Management.

Dr Chris Vas writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.

Watching from Australia, this is the institutional question India’s demographic dividend will hinge on.

The development

China’s universities are being deliberately redesigned. Not just in the catalogue of majors, but in the underlying institutional architecture. At HKUST Guangzhou, the university has substituted the conventional school-faculty-department structure with what it calls a “Hub and Thrust” architecture — mission-oriented academic units organised around themes rather than disciplines, with faculty from different specialisations sharing physical space and bidding for projects together. The Low Altitude Systems and Economy Research Institute (LASERi), established in April 2024 as the university’s first key research platform, has attracted over 80 faculty across data platforms, materials and manufacturing, and navigation systems — all working on the low-altitude economy as a single integrated research mission. Having engaged with faculty there directly, the institutional design is more deliberate than it appears from public materials. Agglomeration is engineered, not incidental.

Independent Western analysts now describe what China is building as a structural advantage. IMD’s Mark Greeven calls it “integration velocity” — the deliberate collapse of distance between research, engineering, production, and the customer. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation argues that China now holds production leadership across a majority of strategically important advanced industries. The clean-technology patent data published by the European Patent Office tells the same story: Chinese applicants filed 18 internationally competitive clean-energy patents in 2000, and over 5,000 by 2022.

The surface implication

The instinctive reading is that India should replicate China’s model. Redesign the catalogue. Align majors to industrial priorities. Build interdisciplinary research institutes around national missions.

The deeper implication is harder. India does not need to copy China’s institutional architecture. It needs to make the strategic choice China has already made — which sectors to go deep on, and which sectors to go broad on. The 0-to-1 / 1-to-100 distinction is not just a description of where the US and China sit. For India, it is the choice variable.

The strategic question

India’s youth population is the largest in the world. The demographic dividend is real but time-bounded. Realising it requires both innovation economies, not one — deep specialisation in a small number of 0-to-1 sectors where India can lead the world, and broad capability-building in a larger number of 1-to-100 sectors where the workforce gets absorbed at scale.

The sectoral split, on a defensible reading, looks something like this.

Go deep at 0-to-1 in quantum technologies, space, pharmaceuticals and biotech, and semiconductor design — sectors where India has existing research strength or strategic necessity. These sectors combine strategic importance, existing scientific capability, and the potential for intellectual-property capture rather than labour-cost competition.

Go broad at 1-to-100 in EV and battery manufacturing, solar manufacturing, drone-enabled agritech, low-altitude economy applications, and advanced manufacturing — sectors where the technology is largely proven and the work is absorbing youth labour into productive capability. These sectors rely less on frontier scientific discovery and more on engineering deployment, process excellence, and workforce scaling.

Both paths require universities to redesign. Neither path will be delivered by ANRF research grants alone.

The Australian template worth studying is the Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) programme. A CRC is not a university designation. It is a federally co-funded consortium in which university lead researchers work collaboratively with industry partners who co-invest cash and in-kind contributions, with outcomes and timelines defined collectively at the outset. The Australian government uses federal funds to crowd in industry capital, and the industry partners hold the universities accountable to commercialisation timelines that pure research grants do not enforce. Australia’s CRC programme has supported sectors ranging from medical technologies to food systems and mining innovation, creating long-term research-commercialisation partnerships that sit between universities and markets.

The Future Food Systems CRC, with which I have direct involvement, is one such consortium — a ten-year programme aligning university researchers, growers, technology providers, and government around food system innovation, with commercialisation outcomes specified at programme inception and tracked through to delivery.

Australia also runs the Trailblazer Universities Programme, which designates specific universities for industrial-priority alignment in defence, resources, and food security. The Trailblazer model designates which universities. The CRC model designates which consortia.

India’s institutional gap is the second one. ANRF can fund university research at TRL 1–4, as I previously discussed. What ANRF cannot do alone is build the consortium architecture that pulls universities into commercial alignment with industry co-investors. A CRC-style programme — call it the India Research Commercialisation Consortia (IRCC), sitting alongside ANRF rather than inside it — would be the institutional move that bridges the gap.

But can Indian institutions reposition themselves?

Among India’s established research institutions, IISc Bengaluru, BITS Pilani, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, University of Delhi and Jadavpur University stand out on the Research and Professional Practice (RPC) parameter of the NIRF 2025 Universities ranking. What would it take for these conventional institutions to anchor a redesign?

Emerging private institutions such as Ashoka University may offer complementary advantages through organisational flexibility and interdisciplinary experimentation. IIT Madras, through its industry research park, and IIT Hyderabad, through its experimentation with interdisciplinary academic structures, are the closest Indian institutions to the kind of redesign HKUST(GZ) has implemented.

The strategic question for India is not whether to pick winners. The demographic dividend will not be realised by hedging. The question is which sectors go deep, which sectors go broad, and which institutions are empowered to deliver each path. Five universities cannot do it alone. Neither can ANRF. The architecture that connects them is the missing layer.

Read The Boardroom Brief below

Dr Chris Vas writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.

The Boardroom Brief

The institutional redesign question is not abstract for boards. Every Indian deep-technology business will need to source talent from a university system whose architecture has not yet been redesigned for the sectors it is hiring into. Every export-oriented manufacturing business will need to access a workforce whose 1-to-100 capability is being built — or not built — by institutions, like the ones named above. The strategic choice about which sectors India goes deep on and which it goes broad on is a business strategic choice as much as a policy one.

Three questions for the board:

1. For the sectors our business operates in, is India positioned to go deep at 0-to-1 or broad at 1-to-100 — and is our talent pipeline aligned to that positioning? Boards in 0-to-1 sectors need university partnerships with research depth and patient time horizons. Boards in 1-to-100 sectors need university partnerships with scale and applied-engineering throughput. Confusing the two produces talent pipelines that arrive in the wrong shape for the work the business actually does.

2. Which Indian universities are we already engaged with on research and commercialisation, and are those institutions among the ones positioned to redesign? If the business is exclusively partnered with traditional IIT or NIT structures organised by conventional department, the relationship may not survive the institutional redesign that is coming. Boards should deliberate whether their university partnerships are with institutions that are actively experimenting with new organisational forms versus those that remain largely discipline-bound.

3. Would a Cooperative Research Centre-style consortium serve our sectoral needs better than a series of bilateral university agreements? The CRC model pulls universities, industry partners, and government co-funding into a single programme with defined commercialisation outcomes and timelines. Bilateral university agreements rarely achieve the same accountability. Boards in sectors where multiple industry players share commercialisation interests — agritech, advanced manufacturing, low-altitude economy applications, EV supply chain — should ask whether the consortium architecture would serve the sector better than the current fragmented model.

India has the youth population. India has the research base. The institutional architecture that connects the two is what determines whether the demographic dividend is realised or squandered.

Dr Chris Vas writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.

Watching from Australia, this is the institutional question India’s ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Fund will have to answer before its first major disbursement cycle closes.

The development

India’s RDI Fund is a serious commitment. The Technology Development Board is the Second-Level Fund Manager for sunrise and strategic sectors. The first Open Call targets projects beyond TRL 4 — lab-validated technology moving toward prototype demonstration. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation coordinates the broader research-to-commercialisation pipeline upstream of the Fund.

The architecture, on paper, is complete. Capital, governance structure, sectoral coverage, TRL targeting — all aligned.

The surface implication

The instinctive reading is that once government capital flows into innovation funding at this scale, the disbursing institutions should behave like venture capitalists. Select winners. Take equity-like positions. Concentrate capital on the technologies most likely to scale fastest. Funding incentives that try to insulate businesses from market forces, rather than position them for sustainable commercial success, produce slow capital with little to show. Supporting only early-stage start-ups while ignoring scale-ups is a route to wasted resources.

The real opportunity is not producing more innovation capital. It is producing it smart.

The strategic question

Governments should not default to behaving like conventional VCs across the innovation cycle. They should play four different roles at four different TRL bands.

At TRL 1–4 — lab and research territory — governments should demand more from public research institutions. India has the IITs, IISc, the CSIR network, and now ANRF-coordinated research programmes. The institutional mandate at this band is technology readiness, not commercial readiness. Funding incentives should push these institutions toward industry partnerships focused on ideation, lab-scale development, and prototyping. VCs can partner with public research institutions on specific projects. They cannot replace them.

At TRL 5 — where lab validation transitions to demonstration — government capital becomes a partner to venture capital, not a substitute for it. This is co-investment territory. Government patient capital flowing alongside private VC that brings deal selection, founder vetting, and portfolio construction skills. Singapore’s Temasek-linked structures are the contemporary version. India’s RDI Fund disbursement at this band should look like co-investment, not direct VC behaviour.

At TRL 6–8 — the Missing Middle band — governments should do two things at once. They should co-invest in FOAK de-risking intermediaries as trusted external experts. And they should build some FOAK capability inside the state itself.

The US Department of Energy Loan Programs Office is the textbook case for the second move. Under Jigar Shah’s directorship from 2021 to early 2025, the LPO was not an arms-length intermediary the federal government co-invested in. It was a unit inside the DoE, staffed by deal teams, project finance specialists, and technical experts, operating with patient horizons and the authority to deploy public capital directly into first-of-a-kind deployments. The Indian analogue is not a new external entity. It is a unit inside TDB, or inside a dedicated cell reporting to ANRF, with a similar mandate to the LPO.

Institutional capability is needed but not sufficient. Instrument design lesson is just as important.

The European Innovation Council’s Accelerator programme targets technologies between TRL 5/6 and TRL 8 — the same Missing Middle band — through a €414 million annual envelope that combines grants and equity. Critically, the EIC does not run a single open call. It runs challenge-based interventions: in 2026, five pre-defined priority areas including advanced materials for energy storage, biotech for soil regeneration, and critical raw materials, each with €20–50 million allocated. Challenge statements direct private innovation toward strategic public priorities rather than waiting for the market to surface them.

India’s RDI Fund’s current Open Call format is responsive — applicants self-select. Challenge-based interventions are directive — the state pre-declares where it wants FOAK deployments to land. India’s RDI Fund can take a page from this approach: design a small number of TRL 6–8 challenge statements in strategic sectors, allocate dedicated capital to each, and use the challenge format to crowd in FOAK-capable applicants and private co-investors at the same time. Building FOAK capability internally is cheaper, faster, and more accountable than waiting for a market of external intermediaries to emerge. Pairing that internal capability with challenge-based instrument design is how the capability gets deployed.

At TRL 9+ — once the technology has cleared first-of-a-kind deployment and is ready to scale — governments should stop funding and start buying. This is the most under-used lever in Indian innovation policy. Public procurement is not a subsidy by another name. It is the creation of a market. When the US Department of Defense procures advanced batteries, when the EU governments increasingly incorporate low carbon procurement criteria into steel and infrastructure purchasing, when South Korea aligns industrial policy, export finance and domestic manufacturing support around semiconductor capability, the procurement decision creates demand certainty that no grant or subsidy can match. Demand certainty unlocks private project finance. Grants pay for the technology. Procurement creates the market the technology then scales into.

India’s public procurement budget — Railways, defence, state electricity utilities, state-owned steel and oil — is enormous, and almost none of it is currently structured as a deliberate innovation policy lever. Grants and subsidies are inferior instruments to procurement at this band. They cost more, scale slower, and create no durable demand signal for the next generation of producers.

None of this implies unlimited or permanent state intervention. The objective is not to socialise commercial risk indefinitely, but to help technologies cross specific market-failure thresholds that private capital alone will not finance. Public support should therefore be milestone-linked, competitively allocated, sunset-bound, and designed to crowd private capital back in as technologies mature.

The question for India is not whether the RDI Fund should exist. It should. The question is whether its disbursing institutions will be allowed to play the four roles public capital is actually built for — direct funder of public research at TRL 1–4, patient co-investor with VC at TRL 5, internal builder and external co-investor in FOAK capability at late TRL 6–8, and anchor buyer at TRL 9+ — or whether they will be pulled into the fifth role public capital is not built for at all.

Four legitimate roles. One temptation to resist.

Read The Boardroom Brief below.

Dr Chris Vas writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.

The Boardroom Brief

The category error is not abstract. It shows up in every government innovation fund disbursement cycle and in every procurement tender that defaults to lowest-cost incumbent supply. The ₹1 lakh crore commitment is large enough that the institutional form of its disbursement will shape Indian deep technology commercialisation for the next decade. Boards engaging with the RDI Fund — as recipients, partners, or eventual suppliers to government procurement — need to read the institutional form, not just the headline allocation.

Three questions for the board:

1. Does our business have the right institutional technology partnerships for the stage of our technology — for example, IITs and IISc at TRL 1–4? If not, the business needs to develop an R&D engagement function to put purpose-led technology development partnerships in place. The institutional partnerships that matter at each TRL band are different, and they cannot be improvised at the point of need. Building the R&D engagement function ahead of the technology demand curve is the move that separates businesses that absorb public research capability from those that read about it.

2. What is our financial model to continue advancing the technologies? To the extent that technology development is linked to core business or is capability-enhancing for vertical integration, the business needs to have in place a risk assessment and a technology roadmap. The roadmap is the document that connects in-house capability, external partnership, capital requirement, and milestone tracking into a single strategic view. Without it, the board cannot tell whether government capital is the right capital, whether VC co-investment is the right capital, or whether neither is — and the answer to that question changes at every TRL band.

3. What international technology transfer partnerships must we have to advance technology development? The business needs to develop the value chain upstream and downstream, test technologies for proof-of-concept in operational environments that will enhance the product, and build a stronger case for project financing at the commercial stages. The strongest deep technology businesses are not those that wait for FOAK intermediaries. Neither do they wait for anchor procurement to emerge in their home market. They are those that have already tested the technology in operational environments abroad, built the international partnerships that validate the unit economics, and arrived at the FOAK conversation with a deployment record rather than a pitch deck.

India has the capital. India has the announcements. The institutional form of the disbursement — and the procurement decisions that follow it — is what will determine whether the ₹1 lakh crore moves the technology, or moves only between accounts.

Dr Chris Vas writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.

Watching from Australia, this may be one of the most important architectural lessons India’s clean technology push will need to absorb before it scales.

The development

India has built the hub layer of its clean technology architecture at speed. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has formally recognised three major ports — Deendayal in Gujarat, V.O. Chidambaranar in Tamil Nadu, and Paradip in Odisha — as Green Hydrogen Hubs under the National Green Hydrogen Mission. Budget 2026 announced a ₹20,000 crore Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage scheme targeting five high-emitting sectors — power, steel, cement, refineries, chemicals — and dedicated rare-earth corridors across four coastal states. The Technology Development Board launched the first Open Call under the RDI Fund on 4 February 2026, funding projects beyond TRL 4.

On paper, the architecture is comprehensive. Geography, money, sectoral focus, all aligned.

The surface implication

Over 90 per cent of announced Australian green hydrogen capacity has not progressed beyond concept or approval stage, according to Rystad Energy, reported in The Australian. More than sixty of around one hundred proposed projects have been quietly archived. The technology alone was not the decisive problem. The institutional form carrying the commercialisation risk proved equally critical.

The instinctive reading is that India is now building everything required to commercialise clean technologies at scale. More hubs, more money, more institutions, more announcements — the assumption is that more equals more commercialisation. This is the logic Indian innovation policy currently runs on.

It is the same logic Australia ran on five years ago.

The strategic question

Hubs are geography. Money is fuel. Neither is an intermediary.

The technologies India is now positioning to commercialise — green hydrogen at industrial scale, CCUS demonstrators, advanced batteries, late stage agritech deployments — sit at Technology Readiness Levels 6 to 8. This is the Missing Middle band. The science largely works. The commercial model usually does not – yet. Venture capital has exited. Project finance has not yet entered. The expertise required to convert demonstrated TRL 7 performance into a bankable TRL 8 project is held by a specialised institutional form — what the literature on boundary-spanning intermediaries calls a First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) de-risking intermediary. It is not an incubator. It is not a research grant body. It is not a state-owned developer carrying public risk on a single balance sheet. It is a specialised intermediary designed to carry first-of-a-kind deployment risk.

The Central Queensland Hydrogen Project ultimately stalled because Stanwell, a Queensland state-owned utility, was the institutional vehicle structuring TRL 6–8 risk. When the new state government refused $1.6 billion in funding in February 2025, Stanwell could not find a replacement funding partner. Kansai Electric had already withdrawn in November 2024. Iwatani closed its Queensland offices in March. The cascade ran from policy reversal to capital exit to project termination in under five months. The solar farm had been built. The electrolyser scale-up was the bridge that did not get crossed.

State ownership is not the same institutional form as a FOAK de-risking intermediary. State ownership concentrates risk on the public balance sheet and leaves projects exposed to political shifts within a single jurisdiction. A FOAK intermediary structures blended capital, absorbs the risk premium that keeps institutional capital out of early deployment, and converts demonstrated performance into bankable projects across multiple investors. The two are not interchangeable.

The United Kingdom recognised this architecturally early and has experimented institutionally. The UKRI Industrial Decarbonisation Challenge committed £210 million in co-investment across six industrial clusters — Scotland, Teesside, Humber, South Wales, and two in the North West — contributing 1.5 million jobs and £320 billion in economic output, while emitting 40 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. The hubs are real. But the UK has also built Earthscale — a £5 million translational capability initiative led by Imperial College and five partner universities, designed explicitly to move start-ups from TRL 5–6 to commercial deployment. Earthscale is not a hub. It is the institution that operates inside the hub system, at the TRL band where commercialisation routinely stalls.

India has built the hubs. The Earthscale equivalent is one part of what comes next. The FOAK de-risking equivalent is the bigger one.

The strategic question for India is not whether to keep announcing hubs. It is which institutions, in which institutional form, at which TRL band, will perform the work that hubs themselves cannot do.

Read The Boardroom Brief below.

The Boardroom Brief

The Missing Middle is where directors should be asking the sharpest questions. The instinct in most boardrooms is to track funding announcements and hub designations as proxies for commercialisation progress. The Central Queensland Hydrogen Project carried $117 million in feasibility study funding from federal, state, and private sources before the consortium wound up. Funding announcements are not the same as deployment. Hub designations are not the same as commercialisation institutions.

Three questions for the board:

1. What TRL bands do our key technologies operate in currently? It is important to understand how the business sees the technology advancing across the TRL ladder and what external institutional support is warranted. The business may have the capabilities to advance technology development in-house, in which case overly relying on external research institutions can be counterproductive. The reverse holds equally. Misreading where in-house capability ends and external institutional support begins is one of the most common, and most expensive, errors in technology commercialisation.

2. Who are the intermediaries that can advance our objectives and capabilities through First-of-a-Kind deployment? Moving beyond lab-scale proof of concept and into operational environments requires a different skillset of project expertise. Procurement, due diligence, resource deployment and management, market awareness raising, government policy understanding, and technical understanding with a view to continually improving the unit cost of production are just some of the skills needed. Some or all of these skillsets can be unique to the technology in question. In some cases, the right institutional response is to insource the intermediary function within business boundaries rather than wait for an external one to emerge.

3. What does the broader technology roadmap look like over the horizon, and what development milestones should we be tracking? This requires acute awareness of product and market conditions that can aid or hinder technology development cycles. Where possible, the board should look to extend partnerships and collaborations with international intermediaries that may be better placed to carry specific segments of the development journey. The roadmap is the document that connects in-house capability, intermediary selection, and milestone tracking into a single strategic view.

India has the hubs. The institutions inside the hubs — and the boardroom clarity about which ones to use, build, or partner with — are what determine whether the technologies arrive.

Dr. Chris Vas (PhD (ANU)) writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.

That is the scale of project-development expertise required, according to David Yeh of Precursor — a veteran of clean-technology project finance — to make a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) project bankable. Permitting. Offtake structuring. Revenue contract design. Lender due diligence. The kind of infrastructure-project experience that takes years to accumulate inside a single team.

FOAK projects often fail not because the technology is weak — but because nobody knows how to turn them into bankable projects.

FOAK projects at Technology Readiness Levels 6 to 8 — where technologies move from pilot validation towards operational and commercial deployment — fail to attract project finance not because the capital is missing. They fail because the project-development capability is missing. Jigar Shah, who led the US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, has made the same argument from the government side. The DOE LPO was institutionally designed to fill exactly that gap.

This is the layer of India’s innovation architecture that the ₹1 lakh crore RDI Fund cannot buy directly.

The development

The RDI Fund is moving from design to deployment. The Technology Development Board (TDB) launched its first Open Call on 4 February 2026. Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) plays the equivalent role for biotechnology. The architecture I described in the previous post in this series — patient capital, two-level fund management, coordinated public-private financing — is now being tested in real time.

But India is not entering this race first. The United States is years ahead in AI infrastructure. China dominates batteries, solar, and increasingly biotechnology. The European Union has set the global pace on clean-industrial regulation, even as its EV industry confronts strategic disorientation. The question for India is no longer whether to fund deep tech. It is how to enter a race that has already started.

The surface implication

The instinctive reading is that India needs to catch up — meaning sprint harder. Catching up implies a sprint. Sprint thinking produces capital-rich, project-poor outcomes. Northvolt’s collapse, despite billions in backing, is a reminder that capital alone does not solve industrial execution risk.

As Enzo Baglieri and I argued in a recent piece for SDA Bocconi, technology transitions historically resemble relay races more than individual runs. Competitive advantage comes from the synchronised handover of the baton, not from isolated acceleration.

The Asian playbook makes the point. Hyundai Motor Group, without grand declarations, has steadily expanded its capabilities in complementary domains. In 2021, the group acquired over 80 percent of Boston Dynamics for more than one billion dollars — positioning itself for collaborative and humanoid robotics over a decade-long horizon. The point was not robotics alone. It was capability positioning across technological futures.

How many Indian deep-tech bets are being placed on similar horizons?

The strategic question

A relay only works if the handoff infrastructure exists. This is where India’s gap is structural — and where the RDI Fund, on its own, will not close it.

Three layers of relay infrastructure remain missing.

Technology roadmapping at scale. A technology roadmap done well is not a static document — it is a dynamic coordination mechanism, aligning capital allocation, regulatory signals, R&D priorities, and cross-border partnerships across time horizons. India has sectoral missions — green hydrogen, semiconductors, quantum, climate technology — but very few institutional roadmaps that connect research, project development, and commercialisation in a single planning horizon. This is what Mariana Mazzucato’s mission-oriented innovation policy framework describes as directionality. India has set directions. It has not yet drawn the roadmaps.

Boundary-spanning intermediaries. These are the actors that broker between technology developers, end-users, regulators, and financiers — what Anna Bergek and colleagues describe as the connective tissue of a Technology Innovation System. They reduce transaction costs. They align stakeholders. They carry projects across the long valley between lab and market. India has no shortage of incubators and accelerators. What it lacks are intermediaries built for capital intensive, long-cycle deep tech.

FOAK project execution capability. This is where the 10,000-hour problem becomes most visible. The expertise that determines bankability — permitting, offtake, revenue contract design, lender due diligence — has not yet accumulated inside India’s deep-tech ventures or its public investment institutions. The US built the DOE LPO to fill exactly this gap. The EU is building it through institutions like the European Investment Bank’s project advisory hubs. India has not yet built its equivalent.

Europe’s challenge, as the longer Bocconi piece put it, is not invention but execution. The same diagnosis applies to India.

Watching from Australia

Australia is not winning the deep-tech race either. But it is investing deliberately in relay infrastructure — project-development capability, sector studios, bilateral tech-transfer programs. The DJI backed drone hub at the Food Innovation Precinct Western Australia, PropaGATE powered by Beanstalk’s Drought Venture Studio and Grower Group Alliance, and the Australia-India RISE program are not large-scale interventions. They are deliberate experiments in how the relay handoff happens. The lesson for India is not the scale of Australia’s effort. It is the deliberateness of design.

The countries that master FOAK execution capability will not just commercialise technology faster. They will capture the financing, standards, supply chains, and geopolitical leverage that follow.

The closing test

By the end of 2028, the test will be visible.

Will India have sprinted and stumbled — well-funded research projects that did not cross the FOAK line? Or will it have relayed and led — a smaller number of globally competitive deep-tech firms built on coordinated roadmaps, intermediated handoffs, and properly resourced project-development capability?

The architecture will not answer this question. Roadmaps, intermediaries, and project developers will.

The next post in this series turns to where India’s relay infrastructure is most visibly being tested — and most visibly missing the point. Intermediaries.

Read The Boardroom Brief below.

Dr Chris Vas writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.

The Boardroom Brief

Four strategic questions for directors of Indian corporates, investors, and large institutions — drawn from the framework Enzo Baglieri and I set out in our Bocconi piece on European competitiveness.

1. In our deep-tech strategy, where should our organisation lead?

Leading requires absorbing risk, building proprietary capability over multi-year horizons, and accepting that some bets will not return capital. For Indian corporates, the realistic answer is sector-specific. An energy major leads on hydrogen storage chemistry. A pharma group leads on biotechnology platforms. An automotive group leads on battery-management software. The boardroom test is whether the organisation’s leadership bets are concentrated enough to matter, internal capabilities strengthened and advancing — and patient enough to outlast a typical CEO tenure.

2. Where should we partner?

This is the question most Indian boards underestimate. Partnership means accepting that another organisation does something better, and committing capital to access it on agreed terms — not to licence it, not to acquire it, not to catch up to it. The CATL-Stellantis arrangement is the European reference case. For Indian corporates, the equivalents are emerging. Exide Industries has signed a memorandum with Hyundai and Kia to manufacture LFP battery cells for the Indian market, with commercial production from its Bengaluru facility planned for 2026. Maruti Suzuki and Toyota are producing their first jointly developed EV from a Gujarat plant on a platform co-developed with Daihatsu. Netafim’s precision irrigation now reaches more than 1.2 million Indian farmers across state programmes and private projects. And Khanij Bidesh India is advancing equity stakes of up to 20 percent in Western Australian lithium projects, alongside a wave of Queensland mining-technology firms now formalising tie-ups with Indian counterparts. Are active partnership discussions structured around long-horizon technology access — or around short-term commercial transactions?

3. Where should we strategically depend?

Dependence is not a failure mode. It is a deliberate choice to source globally what cannot be built domestically at competitive cost or speed. The relevant boardroom question is whether the dependence is managed — through diversified suppliers, contracted supply, technology escrow, and ongoing diplomatic and trade infrastructure — or whether it is passive, accumulated by default. India’s critical minerals exposure is the obvious example: the lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements India must import to power its energy transition, because it does not produce them at commercial scale domestically. Less obvious examples sit in three places. The advanced lithography machines used to print microchips onto silicon wafers, where Dutch firm ASML holds a near-monopoly in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) systems required for advanced semiconductors. The specialised sensing and precision-manufacturing technologies embedded in EVs, industrial systems, medical devices, and defence platforms, where Japanese and German firms remain globally influential across advanced automotive and industrial supply chains. And the materials science, manufacturing processes, and electrochemical know-how that determine battery performance, where Chinese, Korean, and Japanese firms hold deep accumulated advantages across cathode materials, cell chemistry, and large-scale battery manufacturing..

4. Where should we build resilience without sacrificing cost competitiveness?

This is the discipline that keeps the other three questions honest. Resilience is the temptation that turns strategy into autarky. The boardroom check is whether the organisation can name the specific capabilities, supply chains, or technologies it is choosing to bring in-house or onshore — and can defend each choice on cost terms, not just sovereignty terms. The Stellantis €22 billion write-down is the most recent reminder of what happens when strategy is led by sovereignty reflex rather than commercial discipline.

The four questions are not independent. The answers must reconcile across the portfolio. That reconciliation — across leading, partnering, depending, and building resilience — is what a coherent technology roadmap delivers. India has the financing architecture. The roadmap is the next test.

Dr. Chris Vas (PhD (ANU)) writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.

For years, India’s innovation system produced a familiar frustration: world-class engineers, ambitious founders, and abundant digital talent — but too little long-term capital for deep technology.

Software scaled. Science struggled.

In 2026, that may be changing.

Quietly, India is building a new innovation architecture centred on patient capital, strategic technologies, and coordinated public-private financing. At the centre sits a ₹1 lakh crore (around $12 billion) Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Fund — potentially the most significant reshaping of India’s innovation funding system since Startup India launched in 2016.

The Fund is being operationalised through the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), established under the ANRF Act 2023, with the Prime Minister chairing its Governing Board.

At roughly the same time, several other structural shifts landed in quick succession. India extended the definition of deep-tech startups from 10 years to 20 years, and increased the revenue threshold for startup-status benefits to ₹300 crores ($33 million).

Alongside this, the India Deep Tech Alliance launched — a private-sector coalition reportedly bringing together more than $1 billion in aligned capital from firms including Accel, Blume Ventures, Premji Invest, Qualcomm Ventures and Kalaari Capital, with Nvidia participating in an advisory role.

Taken together, these are not isolated policy announcements. They represent an attempt to redesign how India finances strategic technology development.

The easy interpretation — and why it misses the point

The surface reading is straightforward: another government fund, only larger. A deeper-pocketed version of earlier interventions such as Startup India or Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes.

That interpretation misses what is structurally different.

The RDI Fund is not being framed primarily as grant capital. It is being positioned as patient capital — long-duration financing intended for sectors where commercialisation cycles are measured in decades, not quarters.

The proposed structure includes concessional financing rates, long tenures, and equity-linked risk-sharing mechanisms targeted at strategic sectors such as AI, robotics, biotechnology, energy systems, climate technologies, quantum computing, space, and advanced manufacturing.

This matters because it acknowledges something conventional venture capital often struggles with: science-led and capital-intensive technologies do not mature on software timelines.

Deep tech requires longer horizons, larger balance sheets, infrastructure support, and a tolerance for technical uncertainty that many private investors cannot absorb alone.

The demand signal already appears significant. Early calls reportedly drew around 191 proposals, the majority from private-sector applicants — suggesting that the financing gap India is attempting to address is very real.

Why this matters beyond startups

For Indian corporates, this is not simply a startup story.

Large firms in energy, industrial manufacturing, defence, health systems, agritech, and advanced materials may be entering a decade where access to concessional innovation capital becomes a competitive advantage in itself.

The strategic question is no longer whether India wants domestic deep-tech capability.

Which Tata, Mahindra, Reliance, Adani, or mid-cap industrial group positions itself early enough to capture it?

India’s deep-tech funding gap remains substantial. Indian deep-tech ventures reportedly raised around $1.65 billion in 2025, compared with roughly $147 billion in the United States and more than $80 billion in China.

The gap is structural, not aspirational.

Which brings the focus to execution.

Because history increasingly shows that industrial policy success depends less on announcing capital and more on deploying it intelligently.

As I argued recently in a piece on European clean-tech competitiveness, Northvolt’s collapse — despite billions in public and private backing — demonstrated that ambition alone is insufficient. Capital without execution capability, governance discipline, and industrial coordination does not automatically produce globally competitive firms.

Without execution discipline, even well-designed funds risk turning their host economies into what I have described elsewhere as overly ambitious startups — grand ideas, but little runway.

The crowding-in question

This brings us to what may become the defining policy test of the RDI Fund.

Indian venture capital has historically been cautious on hardware-led deep tech because of long gestation periods, high capital intensity, and policy uncertainty. The question is whether the Fund successfully absorbs early-stage risk and catalyses an entirely new financing ecosystem — or whether private capital simply retreats, viewing deep tech as “government territory.”

The specific signals to watch sit in The Boardroom Brief below.

The Australia comparison

Watching from Australia, one lesson stands out.

Australia’s $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund was launched with similarly ambitious objectives in 2023. Announcing capital proved relatively straightforward. Building investment capability inside government proved significantly harder.

Industrial policy increasingly depends not only on funding pools, but on whether the state can recruit, structure, evaluate, and govern complex technology investments credibly over long time horizons.

India now has an opportunity to learn from that gap rather than repeat it.

The closing test

By the end of 2027, the outcome should begin to reveal itself.

Will the RDI Fund have catalysed ten globally competitive Indian deep-tech companies?

Or one hundred well-funded research projects?

Both outcomes have value.

Only one delivers the industrial transformation this architecture appears designed to achieve.

The next post in this series will examine what execution actually requires — and why most innovation funds succeed or fail not at the financing stage, but at the first-of-a-kind project stage.

Read The Boardroom Brief below.

The Boardroom Brief

Three execution signals Indian leaders should track through 2026.

1. How can our business or organisation "crowd-in" capital to align early with India's deep-tech advancement?

The strategic question is no longer whether the RDI Fund is well-designed. It is whether your organisation participates in a way that catalyses follow-on private capital — or stays on the sidelines while the architecture takes shape around you.

Three structural options sit on the table.

Co-investment alongside Second-Level Fund Managers such as the Technology Development Board (TDB) and the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) — the two SLFMs already approved under the RDI Fund, responsible for deploying ₹2,000 crore each in the first tranche.. Indian corporates with deep-tech adjacencies — automotive groups eyeing battery chemistry, pharma groups eyeing biotechnology platforms, energy groups eyeing hydrogen or storage — should be evaluating this now, not at the end of the first call cycle.

Corporate Venture Capital structures aligned to RDI sectors. If your CVC is currently weighted toward software, it is positioned for the last decade, not the next one. The capital-efficiency case for hardware-led CVC has improved structurally because the public balance sheet is now absorbing early-stage risk.

Anchor positions in spin-out platforms emerging from ANRF-supported research institutions. Universities, CSIR labs, and IITs are increasingly the source of commercialisable IP. The corporates that engage first will define the licensing terms.

The boardroom question is direct: is our innovation strategy designed to participate in this architecture, or has it been written for a world that no longer exists?

2. How can we partner with the public sector to expedite deep-tech investment capability?

The capability gap inside India’s public investment system is an opportunity for private-sector partnership, not a criticism.

ANRF is building a dedicated RDI Fund Business Unit. Firms with technical investment expertise — corporate strategy teams, family-office investment arms, sovereign funds, development finance institutions — have a window to engage as capability partners, not just as fund applicants.

Three engagement modes deserve boardroom consideration.

Secondment arrangements that place senior technical investment professionals into ANRF on time-bound assignments. Singapore’s Temasek and Britain’s Patient Capital structures were built partly through this mechanism.

Co-diligence frameworks in which private investors and SLFMs share assessment expertise on shortlisted deep-tech projects. This reduces duplicate effort, accelerates timelines, and builds mutual confidence between public and private actors.

Sector-specific advisory boards where industry leaders contribute to strategic prioritisation, technology readiness assessments, and exit pathways.

The boardroom question: does our organisation have the technical and governance depth to engage at this level — and if not, what investment in those capabilities should the next twelve months deliver?

3. What role should our organisation play in the ANRF and India Deep Tech Alliance ecosystem?

The Alliance is the most credible private-sector counterpart to ANRF. The question for corporates and large investors is not whether to observe it — it is what posture to take within it.

Four roles are emerging.

Limited Partner exposure to Alliance-aligned funds, providing balance-sheet exposure to the Indian deep-tech pipeline without requiring direct sourcing capability.

Strategic partner status for corporates whose markets align with priority sectors — energy transition, advanced manufacturing, climate technology, biotechnology — and who can offer offtake or commercialisation pathways.

Co-investment partner positioning in late-stage rounds where the Alliance has originated and de-risked the asset.

International bridge role for global firms — particularly those from Australia, Japan, the EU, and the United States — that want structured exposure to Indian deep tech without standing up direct operations.

The boardroom question: is our organisation engaging as an originator of this architecture, or as a participant in someone else’s design?

Dr. Chris Vas (PhD (ANU)) writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.

A European steel buyer wants verified emissions data for the next shipment — Scope 1, Scope 2, and the share of Scope 3 traceable to the Indian mill’s own supply chain. The CFO forwards it to her sustainability head, who forwards it to an external consultant.

By Thursday, the team has discovered something more uncomfortable than the Tuesday email itself: two other regulators are asking for much the same data, on different timelines and in different formats.

The data does not sit in one place. In several cases, it barely sits anywhere.

Indian boards have lived with disclosure rules before. What is different in 2026 is convergence.

Three frameworks — BRSR Core domestically, CBAM at the EU border, and the Carbon Credit Trading Scheme at home — now depend on the same underlying emissions data, but ask for it through different verification standards and reporting templates.

They are not three separate compliance items, but one accountability architecture.

Are Indian boards treating them that way?

Start with BRSR.

SEBI’s Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting framework applies to India’s top 1,000 listed companies. BRSR Core, the sharper subset, is mandatory with third-party assurance for the top 500 in FY 2025-26 and extends to all 1,000 by FY 2026-27. It covers Scope 1, Scope 2, and selected Scope 3 emissions, along with energy intensity, water withdrawal, and waste.

From this financial year, it also pulls value-chain partners contributing 2% or more of purchases or sales by value into scope. That means significant suppliers, contract manufacturers, and logistics providers are now part of the reporting chain, whether they are listed or not. What this effectively does is extend compliance beyond the firm — into the supply chain.

Then comes CCTS.

India’s domestic carbon market is now operational across seven obligated sectors: aluminium, cement, chlor-alkali, pulp and paper, petroleum refining, petrochemicals, and textiles. Iron and steel are next.

Trading is expected to begin in the second half of 2026, once measurement, reporting, and verification infrastructure is ready. Read on its own, CCTS looks like another reporting burden.

Read alongside CBAM, it becomes something else: India is asserting regulatory sovereignty by building its own carbon-price architecture before an external one defines the terms for it. The diplomatic question — whether Brussels will eventually accept CCTS prices as equivalent under CBAM — remains unresolved.

This is where technology architecture becomes strategic, not just technical.

The carbon accounting platform an Indian CFO selects in 2026 — international or domestic — will shape audit-trail quality for BRSR Core, CBAM declarations, and CCTS submissions for years to come.

This is where the problem stops being regulatory – and becomes more architectural.

None of this works without auditable, source-linked emissions data moving in near real time. Spreadsheets will not survive third-party verification.

Watching from Australia, where mandatory climate disclosure under AASB S2 is now live for the largest reporters and rolling out in tiers, one comparison stands out: jurisdictions that treat disclosure, pricing, and trade rules as separate workstreams under-build the data infrastructure and then scramble to retrofit it.

As I argued in a recent Dialogue Review piece on Ørsted and Airbus, leading European companies have stopped treating these rules as mere compliance and started treating them as governance discipline.

The question for Indian boards is not whether to comply. It is whether the systems being built this quarter are designed for the architecture within which they live for the next decade.

The Boardroom Brief

Four moves to contemplate before the next quarter closes.

1. Is your company auditing the data architecture, not just the data? If your BRSR Core, CCTS, and CBAM workstreams are running on separate teams with separate spreadsheets, you have three liabilities, not one capability. Commission a single-source-of-truth review: where emissions data originates, who verifies it, and how it flows into each disclosure. This is a CFO question, not just a sustainability problem.

2. Have you pulled the value-chain conversation forward by twelve months? The 2% threshold means significant suppliers will need auditable ESG data this financial year. Many do not have the capability - yet. Boards that wait for the deadline will discover that supplier remediation takes longer than reporting cycles. Conglomerates with diversified supplier bases — auto, FMCG, pharma — should be mapping supplier readiness now, not next year.

3. Are you making the technology decision deliberately, not by default? Carbon accounting platforms — international ones such as Microsoft Sustainability Manager, IBM Envizi, and SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, and Indian ones such as Sprih, Updapt, and Ekameco — are converging on similar architectures but diverging sharply on local fit. The key questions are integration with Tally and Indian SAP environments, audit-trail formats acceptable to BRSR Core assurance providers, and the granularity needed to feed CBAM and CCTS from the same data spine. Specify the requirements before procurement starts, not after.

4. Is your company building disclosure capability because the regulator demands it? Or, because the data can improve energy intensity, supplier consolidation, and product-level carbon performance? The first posture treats sustainability as cost. The second treats it as competitive intelligence. By FY 2026-27, when BRSR Core extends to all 1,000 listed companies and CCTS trading is in full flow, the gap between those two postures will be visible to investors.

Dr. Chris Vas (PhD (ANU)) writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.

Europe is in the middle of its most consequential industrial restructuring in a generation. The EU’s €100 billion Clean Industrial Deal which now incorporates the Industrial Accelerator Act are a wholesale redesign of Europe’s industrial base, its capital markets, and its technology partnerships.

The numbers are stark. Europe needs to increase annual clean tech investment by €660 billion to deliver the objectives of its clean energy transition. Yet clean tech venture capital in Europe fell 24% between 2023 and 2024 — from €11.6 billion to €8.8 billion. In 2025, Europe saw just €8.2 billion in cleantech venture capital investment finishing weaker yet again.

Europe is spending more public money while attracting less private capital. That gap has to be filled somewhere. The question for Indian leaders is: where is it being filled, and what does that create for you?

The surface implication

When Europe restructures its industrial base, it does not do so in isolation. It looks for supply chain partners, technology allies, and market access arrangements. India — with its manufacturing ambition under PLI schemes, and its growing clean tech sector — is directly in that frame.

The Australia-India RISE Accelerator, delivered through CSIRO and India’s Atal Innovation Mission under NITI Aayog, is already one working model of how this technology diplomacy operates in practice — connecting clean tech startups across renewable energy, circular economy, and climate-smart agriculture between two countries. Europe needs similar structures with India. Indian leaders who understand this are positioned to engage on their own terms — not wait to be approached.

The strategic question — what specifically is to be done with this signal?

Three things are happening in European clean tech finance right now that directly affect Indian exporters, manufacturers, and investors. The framework for evaluating your position — and what two Indian companies are already doing about it — is below.

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The full strategic picture

Europe’s clean tech capital problem has a geography. As European venture capital retreats, Asian capital — particularly through transition finance leaders like DBS Singapore — is stepping into the gap. This is not incidental. It reflects a deliberate pivot toward blended finance structures that combine public de-risking with private capital deployment.

For Indian financial institutions and family offices, this is a direct entry point. The blended finance models being constructed in Europe right now — combining pension capital, sovereign wealth, and corporate offtake arrangements — are the same structures India’s GIFT City is positioning to host. The connective tissue between European clean tech projects and Indian capital has never been more available.

The India-specific lens

Three specific pressure points for Indian leaders:

1. Indian exporters facing CBAM

From January 2026, the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism is live. Indian exports of steel, aluminium, cement, and fertilisers now face carbon pricing at the European border. Early market signals are already visible — Indian steel exports to the EU fell during the CBAM reporting phase, and aluminium shipments softened as buyers sought firmer emissions data. The first annual CBAM declaration, covering 2026 imports, is due September 2027. Indian producers who treat this as a 2027 problem are already behind.

2. Indian manufacturers under PLI

Europe’s failure to scale battery manufacturing domestically — illustrated starkly by Northvolt’s collapse in November 2024 despite raising around USD 15 billion since 2016 — creates a strategic window for Indian manufacturers. Northvolt filed for Chapter 11 in the US in November 2024 and bankruptcy in Sweden in March 2025, undone by overambitious expansion, quality failures, BMW’s cancellation of a €2 billion order, and a fundamental mismatch between capital outlays and production reality. The lesson for Indian PLI beneficiaries is not that clean tech cannot scale — it is that scaling requires disciplined supply chain management, realistic capital assumptions, and genuine technology partnerships built on market signals rather than policy optimism.

Two Indian companies are worth watching as early movers on the EU opportunity. JSW Steel has committed USD 2 billion to reduce carbon intensity . One area of investment will be in harnessing advanced technologies such as green hydrogen based steel production— a direct strategic response to CBAM’s pricing pressure on blast furnace production. Hindalco Industries has already started to integrate lifecycle emissions tracking across its aluminium product lines and has publicly committed to the India-UK/Europe Green Corridor. More recently, the company has announced investment to scale up production of quality aluminium foil used in battery and EV components harnessing green energy.

Both are treating EU regulatory pressure not as a compliance burden but as a competitive repositioning opportunity. That distinction — between companies building capability and companies buying time — will define the next decade of Indian industrial competitiveness in European markets.

3. Indian investors and family offices

Under the revised CSRD Omnibus, non-EU companies with more than €450 million in EU net turnover and a qualifying EU subsidiary or branch will face sustainability reporting requirements from 2029. The threshold narrowed significantly from the original €150 million under pre-Omnibus rules — but the companies that remain in scope face more rigorous standards than before. Indian conglomerates and large exporters with significant EU presence should be building CSRD readiness now, not in 2028. The companies that build this capability early will use it as a supplier qualification advantage, not a compliance burden.

Europe’s clean tech VC decline also creates distressed asset opportunities and co-investment openings that did not exist two years ago. Early-stage European clean tech companies — particularly in battery recycling, circular economy, and decarbonisation technology — are actively seeking Asian capital partners. Indian family offices with a 10-year horizon should be looking at this space seriously.

The action

If you are an Indian manufacturer or exporter with EU exposure: commission a CBAM and CSRD readiness assessment in the next 60 days. Not because every deadline is imminent — but because the companies building this capability early will use it as a supplier qualification advantage, not a compliance cost.

If you are an Indian investor: identify two or three European clean tech companies in battery recycling or circular economy that are in Series A or B funding rounds and have Asian market ambitions. Entry valuations are more attractive than they have been in five years.

If you are a civil servant or policy leader: the Australia-India RISE Accelerator is a live, funded model for the kind of technology diplomacy India should be replicating with European partners. The EU needs allies in the Indo-Pacific. India has never been better positioned to set the terms of that engagement.

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Most business leaders, investors, and senior officials across the Indo-Pacific are still trying to figure out what any of it actually means for them. That gap is what this publication exists to close.

The problem is not a shortage of information. Business media covers the announcement, not the implication. Academic papers analyse the mechanism, not the decision. Consultants charge thousands of dollars to tell you what you could have worked out yourself with the right framework. The leader sitting in Mumbai, Kuala Lumpur, or Jakarta — or in a ministry in New Delhi, or running a family office in Singapore, or writing a fund thesis in Shanghai — is left to piece it together from fragments. That is the missing middle.

The cost of it is not abstract. It shows up as strategy decks that misread regulatory direction, capex that lands six months before policy pivots, investment theses built on assumptions that quietly go out of date, and governance decisions made with half the information they needed.

India does not operate in isolation. Its EV policy is shaped by China's battery dominance and Europe's CBAM. Its export strategy is being rewritten by CSRD compliance requirements. Its critical minerals ambitions are entangled with Australian and Canadian supply chains. Its digital public infrastructure is now a model being studied — and challenged — from Brussels to Washington. The most consequential policy decisions affecting Indian businesses and institutions are being made in Brussels, Canberra, Washington, and Beijing — not just New Delhi.

Leaders who only read domestic policy coverage are working with half the map. That is true for founders scaling across borders, for civil servants writing position papers, and for investors allocating capital into a world where the rules are being rewritten everywhere at once.

I have spent twenty years moving between the rooms where these issues are discussed and the rooms where it gets executed. As a Commissioner. As a General Manager of a State level innovation precinct. As an MBA director. As a policy research director. As an executive trainer in India, Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia.

I have published work — in The Business Times, Management Today, the European Financial Review, Dialogue, and The Countryman — because the analysis needed to exist and nobody else was writing it for the audience that needed it most.

The credentials — PhD from ANU, DBA from SDA Bocconi, MIT Sloan executive certificate, Columbia coaching intensive, AICD Graduate — are table stakes. The qualification is having lived and experienced life across geographies long enough to translate information across sectors honestly.

Here is the promise. The Missing Middle will publish every Thursday. Free subscribers get one global development, one strategic implication, one action. Paid subscribers ($8/month or $80/year) get the deeper analytical framework, the methodological depth, and monthly live sessions where we work through the questions you are actually facing. It is built to be worth ten times its subscription price in decision-making clarity.

One ask, and only one. If you read this and it lands, forward it to one person who needs it — one leader, one civil servant, one investor. That is how this publication will find its audience. From there, the work has to earn its place.

Welcome to The Missing Middle IQ.