Indian achievements in S&T

The 500 MWe Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor at Kalpakkam attained first criticality on 6 April 2026, opening stage two of Homi Bhabha's three-stage nuclear programme.

FBR versus thermal reactor

• Neutrons: a thermal reactor slows neutrons with a moderator (light or heavy water); an FBR has no moderator and fissions with fast neutrons.
• Fuel: thermal reactors burn natural or enriched uranium; the PFBR uses uranium-plutonium MOX fuel with a uranium-238 blanket and breeds more plutonium-239 than it consumes.
• Coolant: PHWRs use heavy water; FBRs use liquid sodium, allowing a compact, high-power-density core.

Criticality

• A reactor is critical when each fission, on average, triggers exactly one more, so the chain reaction sustains itself. First criticality at Kalpakkam marks the start of a controlled fission chain reaction, the base for all later power operation.

Implications for a clean-energy future

• Fuel security: far better use of scarce uranium, and a closed fuel cycle with less long-lived waste.
• Thorium bridge: fast reactors can breed thorium-232 into uranium-233, opening stage three and India's large thorium reserves.
• Climate goals: low-carbon baseload power towards net zero by 2070 and the 100 GW nuclear target for 2047, on indigenous technology.
• Caveats: sodium safety, delays and cost, reprocessing capacity and public acceptance.

The PFBR proves an indigenous closed-fuel-cycle capability; scaling fast reactors on time will decide whether thorium can power India's clean future.

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Launched on 3 May 2026, Drishti, built by the Bengaluru startup GalaxEye, is India's largest privately built satellite and the world's first OptoSAR Earth-observation satellite.

Salient features of Mission Drishti

• A privately built Indian Earth-observation satellite, made possible by the space-sector reforms: IN-SPACe as the single-window agency for private players and the Indian Space Policy 2023.
• A small satellite carrying two very different sensors, an optical multispectral camera and a synthetic aperture radar, on one platform.
• Purpose: all-weather, day-and-night imagery for security, agriculture, disasters and infrastructure, with the data sovereignty of an Indian-owned satellite.

Imaging techniques

• Optical (multispectral) imaging: passive sensors record sunlight reflected in several bands; images are detailed and easy to interpret but blind at night and under cloud.
• Synthetic aperture radar: an active sensor transmits microwave pulses and builds a high-resolution image from the echoes as the satellite moves; it sees through cloud, smoke and darkness and captures surface texture, moisture and deformation.
• Fusion: both sensors image the same scene at the same time, and the data are merged into one product, avoiding the time and geometry mismatch of combining images from different satellites.

Why the world's first

• Earlier missions carried either an optical or a radar payload, or flew them on separate satellites; Drishti is the first to combine both in one spacecraft with fusion at source, the 'OptoSAR' design the Prime Minister cited.

Applications and significance

• Uses: border and maritime surveillance, flood and disaster mapping, crop and insurance assessment, urban and infrastructure change.
• Significance: data sovereignty, a growing private space economy and export potential; challenges of funding, data policy and dependence on launch slots.

Drishti shows India's private space sector moving from launch services to frontier sensing technology.

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Fusion — the reaction that powers the Sun — promises abundant, low-carbon baseload power. India has pursued it through the Institute for Plasma Research, Gandhinagar, from the ADITYA tokamak (1989) to SST-1, a steady-state superconducting tokamak, and as a full ITER member since 2005.

India's contributions to ITER

• Partner: one of seven members (EU, China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, USA), bearing about 9% of the construction cost, mostly in kind.
• Hardware: the cryostat (the machine's outer vacuum chamber), in-wall shield blocks, the cooling-water system, cryolines and cryo-distribution, radio-frequency heating sources, power supplies and diagnostics.
• Industry: Indian firms, including many MSMEs, have gained skills in precision fabrication, cryogenics, superconducting magnets and high-power electronics.

Implications of success for global energy

• Fuel: deuterium from seawater and tritium bred from lithium — near-limitless and widely available, ending dependence on imported fuel.
• Clean and safe: no CO2, no long-lived high-level waste, no runaway chain reaction — firm, round-the-clock power to complement variable renewables.
• Shared knowledge: ITER's intellectual property is shared among members, giving India a route to its own demonstration reactor.
• Caveats: repeated delays and cost overruns, tritium supply and materials under neutron load; commercial fusion is likely decades away.

ITER's success would turn fusion from a physics experiment into an engineering route to clean baseload power — and India, as a co-builder, would be ready to use it.

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Semiconductors are the base layer of the digital economy and of defence; India is a large chip consumer and a global design hub, but it has only begun to build fabrication and packaging capacity at home.

Challenges

• Capital and time: a modern fab costs billions of dollars, takes years to build and faces fast obsolescence and heavy technology-licensing costs.
• Ecosystem gaps: fabs need ultra-pure water, uninterrupted power, specialty gases and chemicals, and a dense web of equipment and component suppliers that India lacks.
• Skills and IP: strong design talent, but few fab-process engineers and little home-grown process IP; talent drains to established hubs.
• Competition and geopolitics: large subsidies in the US, EU, Japan and Taiwan; export controls on advanced tools; a handful of equipment makers control supply.
• Market: assured domestic offtake for chips made in India is still thin, and early value addition will be in packaging rather than wafer fabrication.

India Semiconductor Mission: salient features

• Set up in December 2021 with a ₹76,000 crore incentive framework to build a complete ecosystem, not just one plant.
• Fiscal support of up to 50% across four verticals: silicon fabs, compound-semiconductor and sensor units, assembly-testing units, and chip design through a design-linked incentive.
• Progress: 10 projects worth ₹1.60 lakh crore in 6 States approved by December 2025, including the Tata–PSMC fab at Dholera and Micron's assembly plant at Sanand; ISM 2.0 was announced in 2026.

Way forward

• Talent: fab-process training with universities and industry; R&D in mature and compound-semiconductor nodes where India can compete first.
• Partnerships and stability: supply-chain cooperation with the US, Japan and the Quad; stable, long-term policy so that investors commit through industry cycles.

India should build from its strengths — design, packaging and mature nodes — and climb steadily towards advanced fabrication, treating chips as strategic infrastructure rather than a one-off subsidy.

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Chandrayaan-2 reached lunar orbit in 2019, but its Vikram lander could not complete the final descent; Chandrayaan-3 was built to prove that India can land softly on the Moon.

The main task

• Demonstrate an end-to-end safe and soft landing on the lunar surface, followed by rover roving and in-situ scientific experiments: the step that failed in 2019.

Countries that have achieved it

• The Soviet Union, the United States and China; India became the fourth on 23 August 2023, and the first to land near the lunar south polar region.

Subsystems of the spacecraft

• Propulsion module: carried the lander from Earth orbit to lunar orbit; it hosts the SHAPE payload to study Earth from lunar orbit.
• Vikram lander: throttleable engines, navigation, guidance and control, hazard detection and avoidance sensors, landing legs, power and communication, all strengthened after Chandrayaan-2; payloads RAMBHA-LP (plasma), ChaSTE (surface temperature) and ILSA (seismic activity).
• Pragyan rover: LIBS and APXS to analyse the elemental composition of soil and rocks near the landing site.
• Launch: the LVM3-M4 rocket lifted off from Sriharikota on 14 July 2023 and placed the spacecraft in Earth orbit for its onward journey.

The Virtual Launch Control Centre

• A remote facility at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, linked to the launch complex, that receives real-time launch-vehicle data through the countdown and flight.
• Designers monitor the vehicle's health from there and advise the launch team, so decisions rest on the people who built the systems without crowding the launch control room.

The mission proved indigenous landing technology; the lander and rover data from the south polar region add to the world's lunar science.

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Applied biotechnology turns molecular biology into seeds, vaccines, drugs and diagnostics; for the poor its worth depends on whether the products are cheap, safe and within reach.

R&D achievements

• Agriculture: Bt cotton, the only GM crop under commercial cultivation as of 2021; marker-assisted varieties such as Improved Samba Mahsuri rice resistant to bacterial blight; tissue-culture plantlets; biofertilisers and biopesticides.
• Health: indigenous vaccines including Rotavac and recombinant hepatitis B, and against Covid-19, Covaxin, ZyCoV-D and Corbevax; low-cost biosimilars such as insulin; affordable diagnostic kits.
• Genomics: INSACOG (December 2020) tracks coronavirus variants, and GenomeIndia has sequenced over 10,000 genomes for disease surveillance and precision medicine.
• Support system: the Department of Biotechnology and BIRAC fund research and start-ups; Biotech-KISAN links scientists with small and women farmers.

How they uplift the poor

• Health costs: cheaper vaccines and biosimilars cut out-of-pocket spending; low-cost diagnostics bring early detection to primary care and immunisation programmes.
• Farm incomes: resilient, higher-yield and biofortified crops raise small-farm output and nutrition; biofertilisers and biopesticides cut input costs.
• Jobs and enterprise: bio-industries, rural bio-enterprises and Biotech-KISAN hubs create work outside agriculture.
• Public health: genomic surveillance guides pandemic response, on which the poor, with the least buffer, depend most.

Cautions

• Biosafety and regulatory trust: GM mustard was cleared for environmental release in 2022, but the Supreme Court split on it in July 2024.
• Seed prices and corporate dependence, IPR barriers and uneven access; public-sector research, affordable pricing and extension are needed.

Biotechnology reaches the poor only when innovation is matched by affordable access, sound regulation and farmer training.

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Visvesvaraya built the water systems that made dry land farmable; Swaminathan raised what that land could yield. Together they form one chain from water to food.

Sir M. Visvesvaraya: water engineering

• Block system of canal irrigation in the Deccan, rationing water by turns so that more land was irrigated from the same flow.
• Automatic reservoir sluice gates that raised storage safely; chief engineer of the Krishnaraja Sagara dam on the Cauvery, which supplies irrigation and drinking water to this day.
• Flood-protection system for Hyderabad; planning by data, economy and technical education; Engineers' Day on 15 September honours him.
• Benefit: secure cultivation in dry tracts, city water supply, and a model of engineering-led public works.

Dr M. S. Swaminathan: agricultural science

• Led the adaptation and spread of high-yielding wheat and rice as head of IARI and ICAR, turning the Green Revolution into food self-sufficiency after the shortages of the 1960s.
• Chaired the National Commission on Farmers, which urged MSP at least 50 per cent above the cost of production; argued for an 'evergreen revolution' that sustains yields without harming soil and water.
• Benefit: higher yield per hectare, food security and higher farm incomes, and a farmer-centred policy agenda.

One gave India its water systems, the other its seeds and farm-policy ideas; together they anchor irrigation-led, science-led agriculture and food security.

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In June 2019 ISRO announced that India would build and run its own space station in low Earth orbit rather than join the International Space Station.

The plan

• A modular station as the follow-on to Gaganyaan, India's first human spaceflight mission, for crewed stays and microgravity research.
• Announced by ISRO chairman K Sivan in June 2019; since then the Cabinet approved the first module, BAS-1 of the Bharatiya Antariksh Station, in September 2024, targeting launch in 2028 and the full station by 2035.

Benefits to the space programme

• Science: a permanent microgravity laboratory for materials, biology, medicine and physical sciences, plus in-orbit tests of new technologies.
• Capability: docking, life support, crew transfer and long-duration human presence build the skills for deeper missions, including a crewed lunar landing targeted for 2040.
• Autonomy: India sets its own research agenda and partnerships rather than depending on others' stations.
• Industry: steady demand for modules, launches and services gives firms and start-ups, supported by IN-SPACe, a pipeline of work.

Challenges

• High cost, radiation and life-support risks, heavy-lift launch capacity, docking reliability, and justifying the spend against social priorities.

A station would turn Gaganyaan's first crewed flight into a lasting human presence in orbit, provided cost, safety and launch capacity are managed well.

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After India had to fight patents on turmeric and neem in foreign patent offices, it moved from costly case-by-case reaction to a proactive defence: give examiners the evidence that the knowledge is old, so that wrong patents are never granted.

Documenting prior art: the TKDL

• Set up in 2001 by CSIR with the Ministry of AYUSH, the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library converts formulations from Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha and Yoga texts into five international languages, organised under the Traditional Knowledge Resource Classification.
• Patent examiners at offices such as the European Patent Office and the USPTO search it under a non-disclosure access agreement, so prior art is visible before a grant.
• CSIR files third-party observations and pre-grant oppositions with TKDL evidence; hundreds of applications abroad have been rejected, withdrawn or amended.

Domestic law

• Patents Act, 1970: Section 3(p) bars patents on what is in effect traditional knowledge, and Section 25 allows opposition on the ground of knowledge held by local or indigenous communities.
• Biological Diversity Act, 2002: National Biodiversity Authority approval is required before seeking intellectual property rights on Indian biological resources, with benefit-sharing for the communities concerned.

International effort

• India has pressed for mandatory disclosure of the source of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge in patent applications; WIPO adopted a treaty on this in 2024.

Limits

• TKDL covers documented texts of Indian medicine; oral and community knowledge, and fields beyond medicine, are harder to protect, so monitoring of patent filings must continue.

India's method is to prevent wrong grants by giving examiners the evidence rather than lock knowledge away; extending it to oral knowledge and to more patent offices would widen the shield.

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In 1924 Satyendra Nath Bose derived Planck's law of black-body radiation by counting light quanta in a new way; Einstein extended the method to atoms, and the result became Bose-Einstein statistics.

Bose's work

• The new counting: Bose treated photons as identical and indistinguishable, with any number allowed in one energy state; counting the arrangements this way gave Planck's law without borrowing from classical physics.
• Einstein's part: he translated the paper into German, had it published in the Zeitschrift für Physik in 1924, and applied the statistics to a gas of atoms, predicting that at very low temperature they would settle into a single quantum state.

How it revolutionised physics

• Two families of particles: bosons (named by Paul Dirac) obey Bose's rule, carry integer spin and can crowd into one state; fermions, with half-integer spin, follow Fermi-Dirac statistics and Pauli's exclusion principle.
• Bose-Einstein condensation: Einstein's prediction was realised in the laboratory in 1995 and opened cold-atom physics.
• Explaining the unexplained: lasers (photons are bosons), superfluid helium-4 and superconductivity (electron pairs act as bosons) rest on bosonic behaviour; the W, Z and Higgs particles are bosons too.
• Recognition: Padma Vibhushan (1954) and National Professor (1958); no Nobel Prize, but 'boson' carries his name.

Bose's counting rule gave physics its second kind of quantum statistics; from lasers to condensates, it remains one of the deepest Indian contributions to modern science.

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India pairs a large scientific workforce and a strong generic-pharma base with big needs in health, food and energy and a supportive policy framework; together these have made biotechnology one of its fastest-growing knowledge sectors.

Why so much activity

• People and cost: a large pool of trained biologists, chemists and engineers, and research at a fraction of Western cost.
• Industry base: an established generic pharmaceutical industry with manufacturing scale and regulatory experience, ready to move into biologics.
• Demand: a large disease burden, the need for affordable vaccines and drugs, food security and biofuels create domestic markets.
• Policy: the Department of Biotechnology (1986), the National Biotechnology Development Strategy 2015-20, BIRAC (2012) funding start-ups and industry-academia projects, biotech parks and incubators, and Make in India.
• Resources and farm use: rich biodiversity; Bt cotton since 2002, biofertilisers, biopesticides and tissue culture, though the debate on GM food crops continues.
• IPR: product patents since 2005 pushed firms from copying towards innovation.

How biopharma has benefited

• Vaccines: India is a leading vaccine maker for the world; indigenous products such as Rotavac show research-to-market capability.
• Biosimilars: guidelines on similar biologics (2012, revised 2016) opened a regulated path; Indian firms make affordable insulin and monoclonal antibodies, cutting prices at home and building exports.
• Diagnostics and enzymes: low-cost diagnostic kits and industrial enzymes widen access and lower healthcare costs.
• Ecosystem: BIRAC grants and incubators have created a pipeline of biopharma start-ups.

Challenges

• Thin early-stage funding, slow approvals, dependence on imported inputs and equipment, weak translational research, and biosafety and clinical-trial ethics.

India's biotech surge rests on skills, policy and demand; sustaining biopharma's gains needs more research funding, faster and predictable regulation, and strong IPR and biosafety frameworks.

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A crewed flight is a different order of challenge from a probe: the payload must survive, and so must the crew.

Technological obstacles

• Human-rated launcher: a rocket certified for near-zero failure tolerance; GSLV Mk III, whose first developmental flight was in June 2017, must prove itself over repeated launches.
• Crew module and return: heat shield, controlled re-entry, parachute deceleration and sea recovery; ISRO tested these with SRE-1 (2007) and the CARE capsule (2014).
• Life support: air, water, temperature and radiation control in a sealed cabin, and a crew escape system for launch aborts, neither flight-tested by 2017.

Logistical obstacles

• Astronaut selection and training, space medicine, crewed mission control, a global tracking network and recovery ships.
• Cost: a decade-long budget commitment competes with development needs, and one failure costs lives and prestige.

Critical examination

• The barrier is certification, reliability and funding, not raw capability: ISRO has a heavy launcher, re-entry experience and deep-space navigation from Chandrayaan-1 and the Mars Orbiter Mission.
• The case for going ahead: spin-offs in materials, medicine and electronics, prestige, inspiration for youth and space diplomacy; partnerships can fill gaps in training and life support.

The obstacles are demanding but manageable; a phased, safety-first programme with partnerships can take India from robotic to human spaceflight (since then, ISRO's Gaganyaan programme envisages a three-member crew in a 400 km orbit for three days, returning to Indian waters).

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India's nuclear programme, shaped by Homi Bhabha, was planned around scarce uranium and abundant thorium, which produced a three-stage strategy and a lasting emphasis on self-reliance.

Growth of nuclear science and technology

• Foundations: Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (1945), Atomic Energy Commission (1948) and Department of Atomic Energy (1954); Apsara at Trombay (1956) was Asia's first research reactor, followed by CIRUS (1960).
• Power generation: Tarapur (1969) with imported boiling water reactors, then an indigenous line of pressurised heavy water reactors run by NPCIL, scaled from 220 MWe to 540 MWe and 700 MWe designs.
• Full fuel cycle: uranium mining at Jaduguda, heavy water plants, fuel fabrication and reprocessing gave India command of the closed cycle.
• Strategic capability: the 1974 and 1998 tests; the sanctions that followed deepened indigenisation.
• Applications: radioisotopes for cancer therapy and diagnostics, radiation processing of food, mutation-bred crop varieties, desalination and industrial radiography.
• Opening up: the 2008 civil nuclear agreement with the United States, IAEA safeguards and the Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver allowed uranium and reactor imports; Kudankulam was built with Russia.
• Fast reactors: the Fast Breeder Test Reactor at Kalpakkam (1985) built experience for the 500 MWe Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor of BHAVINI (since then, the PFBR attained first criticality on 6 April 2026).

Advantage of the fast breeder programme

• More fuel out than in: the uranium-238 blanket converts into plutonium-239, so the reactor breeds more fissile material than it consumes.
• Multiplies uranium: it draws far more energy from the same natural uranium, stretching limited domestic reserves and cutting import dependence.
• Gateway to thorium: a thorium blanket breeds uranium-233, the fuel of the third stage, unlocking India's very large thorium reserves for long-term energy security.
• Closed cycle: reprocessing and recycling reduce long-lived waste, and the technology is largely indigenous.
• Caveats: sodium coolant demands rigorous safety, costs are high and the prototype took long to commission.

Fast breeders link today's heavy water fleet to a thorium future; if safety and cost are mastered, they give India an energy base largely free of imported fuel.

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From the first satellite Aryabhata to the Mars Orbiter Mission, ISRO has built a self-reliant, low-cost space programme whose declared purpose has always been national development rather than prestige alone.

Achievements in space science and technology

• Launch vehicles: from SLV-3 to the PSLV workhorse and the GSLV; the indigenous cryogenic upper stage flew successfully on GSLV-D5 in January 2014, and the heavier GSLV Mk III is under development.
• Satellites: the INSAT/GSAT communication series, the IRS remote-sensing fleet, the seven-satellite IRNSS (NavIC) regional navigation system completed in 2016, and Astrosat (2015), India's first multi-wavelength observatory.
• Science missions: Chandrayaan-1 (2008) found evidence of water on the Moon; the Mars Orbiter Mission entered Mars orbit in September 2014 on India's first attempt and at a modest budget.
• Technology and commerce: the reusable launch vehicle demonstrator flew in May 2016, and PSLV launches foreign satellites through Antrix (since then, 104 satellites in one launch in February 2017 and the Chandrayaan-3 landing near the lunar south pole in 2023).

Applications in socio-economic development

• Communication: INSAT/GSAT transponders carry telephony, television and DTH to remote areas; tele-education links classrooms to expert teachers and telemedicine links district hospitals to specialists.
• Agriculture and resources: crop-area and yield forecasting, groundwater prospect maps, watershed and land-use planning, and potential fishing zone advisories that raise catch and save fuel.
• Disaster management: INSAT weather data and cyclone tracking enabled mass evacuation before cyclone Phailin in 2013; satellites map floods, droughts and forest fires for relief.
• Navigation and transport: NavIC for vehicle tracking, fishing and defence, and GAGAN for safer civil aviation.
• Governance: imagery for land records, urban planning and geo-tagging of MGNREGA assets, shared through the Bhuvan geoportal.

India's space programme pairs frontier science with everyday services in classrooms, farms and cyclone shelters: space as an instrument of development, not only of pride.

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Nanotechnology engineers matter at 1 to 100 nanometres, where materials acquire new strength, conductivity, reactivity and optical behaviour that bulk matter does not show.

Why a key technology

• Scale changes properties: carbon nanotubes are stronger than steel yet light, silver nanoparticles kill microbes, nano-catalysts react faster; materials can be designed atom by atom.
• General-purpose reach: targeted drugs and sensitive diagnostics, better solar cells and batteries, smaller and faster chips, membranes for water, and inputs for agriculture.
• Convergence: it fuses with biotechnology, information technology and materials science; the countries that lead it gain in manufacturing, health and defence.

Nano Mission: salient features

• Launched by the Department of Science and Technology in May 2007 with Rs 1,000 crore for five years, as an umbrella programme for capacity building in nanoscience and nanotechnology.
• Basic research: grants to individual scientists and research units in nanoscience.
• Infrastructure: centres of excellence and shared facilities for synthesis, characterisation and fabrication, open to institutions nationwide.
• Applications and technology development through joint institution-industry projects, with promotion of public-private partnership.
• Human resource development through postgraduate programmes, fellowships and training, plus international collaboration and public awareness of nanoscience.

Scope in India's development

• Water: nano-membranes and nanoparticle filters to remove arsenic, fluoride and pathogens from rural drinking water cheaply.
• Health: cheap point-of-care diagnostic kits and targeted delivery of drugs for tuberculosis and cancer, cutting dose and side effects.
• Agriculture: nano-fertilisers and pesticides that cut input use, and smart packaging that reduces post-harvest loss.
• Energy, environment and industry: efficient solar cells, LEDs and catalysts, pollution sensors, and lighter, stronger composites, coatings, textiles and cement.
• Caution: nanoparticles can be toxic to people and ecosystems, and standards lag; safety research and regulation must grow with applications.

Nanotechnology can serve India's goals in water, health and energy if the Nano Mission's research is carried into safe, affordable products, with regulation keeping pace.

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