India’s draft health research policy sets its sights on the world’s leading research economies. It has yet to build the financial instruments those economies actually run on.
Every national research policy eventually measures itself against the same short list of countries — the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan — and the Draft National Health Research Policy 2026 is candid enough not to pretend otherwise. Its language of self-reliance, of transitioning India from a consumer of external medical evidence to a producer of indigenous healthcare solutions, borrows the vocabulary of catch-up economics. The comparison is instructive, but not for the reasons the policy itself emphasises. The gap between India and its chosen peers is not primarily one of governance architecture, where the draft’s proposals are, in fact, reasonably sophisticated. It is a gap of who pays.
A Tale of Two Funding Mixes
In the United States, business enterprise finances roughly two-thirds of total health research and development, with federal government providing a substantial but secondary share through the National Institutes of Health. In Germany, industry funds close to seventy per cent of national research spending, with the federal and Länder governments financing the remainder through a dual system of block funding and project grants. In Japan, industry’s share climbs higher still, with public agencies concentrating on bridging early discovery to commercial translation rather than financing the bulk of research itself. Even in the United Kingdom, where the NHS-embedded National Institute for Health and Care Research plays an unusually large public role, private pharmaceutical investment remains a substantial, coequal partner.
India’s health research enterprise inherits none of this balance. It remains overwhelmingly dependent on public financing, with private industry, philanthropic capital, and corporate social responsibility contributions occupying a distinctly minor share. The draft policy is aware of this asymmetry — it says, plainly, that raising private investment and aligning it with national priorities is a central aim — but the instruments it proposes to achieve that aim remain, on close reading, more suggestive than concrete.
Every comparator economy India measures itself against built its research intensity on a foundation of private capital the draft policy has not yet found a way to summon.
The Missing Instruments
The draft does propose demand-side mechanisms — advance market commitments, milestone-based challenge awards, public procurement that positions the state as an assured early buyer of proven indigenous innovations — and these are genuine, useful tools already familiar from global health financing. But the supply-side instruments that made industry investment a majority share of research spending in Germany, Japan, and the United States are largely absent from the text: no weighted tax deduction specifically calibrated for indigenous clinical trials and neglected-disease biopharmaceuticals, no patent-box regime reducing the tax burden on revenue from India-registered patents, no matched risk-capital equity fund co-financed by the Department of Health Research and private venture capital to de-risk early-stage health technology ventures through the valley between prototype and regulatory approval.
This absence matters because the difference between a modest private share and a majority private share is rarely a matter of goodwill or corporate social responsibility — it is a matter of financial engineering. Germany’s Länder do not persuade industry to invest through appeals to national purpose alone; they build tax and regulatory environments in which health research investment is, quite simply, a rational commercial decision. Japan’s AMED does not merely encourage translation from university discovery to industrial scaling; it operates dedicated bridging programmes engineered specifically to make that transition financially attractive to industry partners. The comparative table is, in this sense, less a scoreboard than a blueprint — and the blueprint’s financial chapters are the ones the draft has yet to write.
A Longer Project Than One Policy Document
It would be unfair to expect a single policy, however comprehensive, to conjure a mature venture-capital and biopharmaceutical risk-financing ecosystem into existence by administrative fiat. That ecosystem, in every comparator economy examined here, took decades and multiple generations of policy to build, and rests on institutions — patent courts, technology-transfer offices, a functioning public market for early-stage biotechnology — that lie well outside the remit of a health research policy alone. What the draft can reasonably be asked to do, and what its current text does not yet do, is name the specific fiscal instruments it intends to pursue, in coordination with the Ministry of Finance, so that the aspiration to ‘self-reliance’ is accompanied by the machinery that has, everywhere else, made self-reliance financially viable rather than merely rhetorically desirable.
India does not need to replicate any single comparator’s model wholesale — its public health priorities, disease burden, and institutional history differ meaningfully from all four. But the comparative exercise the policy itself invites makes one thing clear: the countries India is measuring itself against did not simply spend more. They built the specific financial architecture that made private capital want to spend alongside them. Until the final NHRP names that architecture, the comparison remains aspirational rather than operational.
– Dr Deekshitha R Valipe, Germany
