Global companies love Indian engineers. Just not enough to share the patents.

India has become the R&D darling of the corporate world. Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune—just name the city, and odds are there’s a shiny new global R&D centre taking root, complete with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, social media blitz, and a minister or two on the dais. The headlines write themselves: “India is not just a market, it’s a hub of innovation.”

But as the cameras fade, a quieter question lingers: Innovation for whom?

Because while the engineers are local, the ideas, patents, and profits rarely are.

A Technocrat’s Paradise, an Entrepreneur’s Desert

There’s no denying the scale. Over 1,200 foreign companies now run R&D shops in India—GE, Google, Bosch, Amazon, Intel, you name it. The country has the third-largest pool of tech R&D workers globally. Every major multinational is here, tinkering, coding, testing, debugging.

But there’s a catch. These are not India’s labs. These are extensions of someone else’s product line. The shiny centres are often glorified offshore appendages, building for Stuttgart, Cupertino, Tokyo or Seoul. The patents? Filed abroad. The brand? Foreign. The profit? Ditto.

The Indian engineer, brilliant and resourceful, often ends up as the ghost in someone else’s machine.

India: The Brain, Not the Mind

To be fair, we do a lot. We code the firmware, refine the user interface, test the prototypes, and sometimes even lead development. But the architecture—the original idea—comes from HQ. And when the product hits the shelves, it bears no imprint of where it was actually built.

It’s the equivalent of flying Indian minds to the moon—on a foreign rocket, flying a foreign flag, with someone else claiming mission control.

So Where’s the Ownership?

You would think that hosting these many labs would come with perks—shared IP, domestic tech spillover, local supply chains. But here’s what’s mostly missing:

• Co-created patents with Indian inventors
• Product IP housed in India
• Joint ventures with Indian universities or MSMEs
• Local component sourcing, even in small percentages

What we have are developers, not designers. Builders, not owners. And the learning curve that creates mature tech ecosystems—from garage to global—is nowhere in sight.

China Took a Different Route

China, famously, wasn’t so accommodating. Want access to its massive market? Sure. But here’s the deal:

• Form a 50:50 joint venture
• File patents in China
• Use local engineers
• Source components locally

No exceptions. The result? Huawei, BYD, CATL, Haier. Chinese companies didn’t just rise—they were built, step by deliberate step, on the scaffolding of foreign investment.

India, meanwhile, welcomed everyone and asked for nothing. And got, well, not much in return.

What the Government Has Tried

There are plenty of well-meaning schemes. Production-linked incentives (PLIs), the Startup India campaign, the Semiconductor Mission, liberal FDI rules. These have brought in capital, built infrastructure, and created jobs.

But they remain output-focused—measured by units shipped, not value created.

There’s no binding mandate for co-development. No requirement to share technology. A few MoUs with IITs and state labs float around, but these are more CSR than serious R&D partnerships. Meanwhile, Indian universities and MSMEs remain outside the gates.

The Fix is Obvious—If Politically Unfashionable

India doesn’t need to be protectionist. But it does need to be strategic. Here’s what that might look like:

1. Mandate Co-R&D
   Require that a share of R&D work done in India include Indian co-inventors and institutional partners. Say, 25% of patents filed from a foreign R&D centre must list an Indian co-author.
2. Tie PLIs to Tech Transfer
   Don’t just reward production. Reward IP creation, local design, and co-developed innovation.
3. Audit R&D Outcomes
   A national R&D council could track how many patents are filed in India, how many are co-owned, and how many have downstream benefit to local suppliers.
4. Fund Domestic Champions
   Support Indian scale-ups with buy-back guarantees, regulatory sandboxing, and global market access.

The Final Word

India doesn’t suffer from a lack of talent. It suffers from a lack of tech sovereignty. Our engineers are flying high—but always in someone else’s aircraft. If we don’t take ownership—of the ideas, the products, and the systems—we’ll remain a nation of coders-for-hire.

The R&D centres will keep coming. But unless India learns to co-own the patents, the next generation of technology will still bear someone else’s name.

The time to change that isn’t five years from now. It’s now.