Abstract: India is on the path to becoming a host for high technology industries, be it manufacturing or services. High technology exports in India’s commodity exports have increased from virtually zero in the 1990s to almost 11 per cent in 2021. More than 50 per cent of our services exports can now be considered high-tech. The two industries that can enable the country to be launched into the club of high technology are its pharmaceutical manufacturing and computer software services industries. Much of the innovation output of the country, as indicated by patents, has gone towards these industries, especially when foreign patenting (read as at the USPTO) by Indian inventors is considered. Changes in the international governance rules concerning patenting, especially the TRIPS compliance requirement, which India had to implement in 2005, have imposed new challenges to the pharmaceutical and computer software services industries. The lecture will assess how the two industries have negotiated these challenges by evaluating their innovative performance of these two industries. The analysis will then distil out some industry policy priorities to improve their innovative performance.

Speaker: Sunil Mani is Director and Reserve Bank of India Chair Professor at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Trivandrum. Formerly, he was a member of the faculty and head of graduate studies at the United Nations University-Institute for New Technologies (now known as UNU-MERIT) at Maastricht in the Netherlands. He obtained his M. Phil and Ph.D. in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and has done postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford on a fellowship from the Ford Foundation, New York. He has held visiting professorships at Bocconi University – Milan, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies – Tokyo, and University of Toulouse – Jean Jaures. Currently, he is a member of the drafting committee for India’s new Science, Technology and Innovation Policy 2020.