Boosting Innovation: DRDO Director Highlights Need for Industry and Academic Growth

Boosting Innovation: DRDO Director Highlights Need for Industry and Academic Growth.webp

Ahmedabad, March 13 India’s limited work on intellectual property rights and “stagnant” research is a worrying trend, a top Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) official said on Friday, urging industry and academic institutions to step up.

Indian industries are good at certain things like making tools, but when it comes to the technology of design and process development, they hardly have any IPRs worth noting, said Dr. Makarand G Joshi, DRDO’s Director of Research and Development Establishment (Engineers).

“It has been about licensed production for ages. Similarly, on the academic side, the quality is quite poor,” he said at the ‘International Conference on Composite Materials and Technologies’ organized by the Ahmedabad University.

“In the last 20 years, China has moved to the right and upward. And we have kind of stagnated. We have slightly moved up, but to the left. The amount of money we are spending on research in general is less as a percentage of GDP than it was 15 years back. So, that is a worrying trend,” he said.

Referring to his stint as the chairperson of the Aeronautics Research and Development Board panel for about six years, Joshi said he had a good insight into how projects were funded across academic institutions. “The quality, I am sorry to say, is quite poor,” he said.

He encouraged industries, researchers and students to contribute more actively to research and innovation.

“So, I appeal to all youngsters here. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set a clear goal: India must become Viksit Bharat by 2047. This can happen only if each one of us contributes positively. In this effort, it is not only research organisations like DRDO that matter; the heavy lifting must be done primarily by industry and academic institutions,” he said.

Nilesh Desai, director of the Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad, a research facility under the Indian Space Research Organisation, said that they have faced some failures recently, but in ISRO, they don’t get deterred by setbacks.

“As far as space is concerned, ISRO achieved its peak on August 23, 2023, with the landing of Chandrayaan-3. But in the recent past, right now, we are struggling,” Desai said.

Referring to recent failures involving ISRO’s PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) rocket, he said, “Last time, there was a failure at the beginning of the third stage. And this time, at the end, it resulted in a failure. And then the vehicle went into ‘tumbling mode’. And although the control system tried to correct it or control it, it didn't work out. And again, we failed.”

“The two failures, I really worry about,” he said.

Desai said ISRO concluded that the graphite lining it was using in the solid stage had some problems. The supplier was the same, but the material was of slightly “inferior” quality, he said.

For “more objective evaluation”, he said, the government is now insisting on having a planned “composition, including academia, industry, and other research institutions and not many people from ISRO”.

“In ISRO, we don’t get deterred by failure. I am sure we will overcome this, and come out with the help of all the other experts from the industry and academia,” he said.

ISRO’s PSLV-C62 rocket, carrying 16 satellites that included a foreign Earth Observation payload, failed to place them in the intended orbit after encountering an “anomaly” in the critical third stage of the launch in January 2026.

A similar attempt in May 2025 (PSLV-C61-EOS-09) also did not succeed due to “motor pressure issue” and a fall in the chamber pressure of the motor case.
 
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academic institutions ahmedabad university chandrayaan-3 composite materials drdo india industry intellectual property rights isro narendra modi pslv rocket research and development space applications technology development viksit bharat
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