Indholdsfortegnelse for February 8, 2021 i India Today

Over the next four years, India will cross three significant milestones in its history. It will celebrate the 75th anniversary of its Independence in August 2022, and the 75th anniversary of being a Republic in 2025. Sometime in 2024, we are projected to cross China as the planet’s most populous country. Therefore, it is as good a time as any to take stock of where we stand as a nation and where we are headed. The Constitution of India, which was adopted in November 1949, indicated the destination for the young republic—the welfare of all its citizens. The opening sentences of the Preamble resolved to secure for them justice—social, economic and political. India’s road ahead, however, was rocky and uncharted, and the challenges enormous. Close to half its 376 million…

When it comes to the economy, past experiences offer context to gauge current challenges. The Indian economy has weathered some major disruptions in the past decades—these include the nationalisation of 14 private banks by prime minister Indira Gandhi in July 1969, and then, in the late 1970s, the Morarji Desai government’s implementation of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, which barred foreign investors from owning over 40 per cent of Indian enterprises and led to multinationals like IBM and Coca-Cola exiting the Indian market. Following the balance of payment crisis in 1991, the Narasimha Rao government implemented several reforms to remove structural bottlenecks in various sectors. Under then finance minister Manmohan Singh, the industrial licensing (licence raj) system was abolished, financial sector reforms were taken up and trade was liberalised. This…

India’s industrial history, in which manufacturing is prominent, is marked by three post-Independence phases—planned development till the end of the 1970s, limited liberalisation in the 1980s and the post-reform period after the early 1990s. Following Independence, early governments had the tall task of rebuilding India’s industries after centuries of British rule. The planned development period focused on increasing production and ensuring equitable distribution by stressing the role of the state. At this time, private business owners required licences to set up/ expand operations in most major industrial sectors, with a specified schedule of industries subject to licensing. In the 1980s and later, India’s industrial controls were gradually relaxed, with efforts being made to modernise various sectors through technology imports and foreign capital. However, it was the New Economic Policy of…

In recent months, India’s agriculture sector has remained in the national headlines, not least because of the continuing protests by farmers on the borders of the national capital. With the violence on Republic Day, these protests made it even to the international headlines. The farmers, predominantly from Punjab and some districts in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, have made it clear that their sole demand is the repealing of the Centre’s three farm laws. Digging a little deeper, the fear revealed is that the government is intent on liberalising the agricultural sector—developing a capitalist market mechanism with priorities other than assured crop procurement and buffer stocks. In September last year, with much political drama and even allies resigning in protest, the Centre cleared three pieces of farm legislation—the Farmers’ Produce Trade…

Capitalise on the prevailing anti-China sentiment and enhance capacities in food and agriculture exports, textiles, automotive, electronics components, pharma machinery and so on States should play a major role in building domestic capabilities and become a viable suppler in the global market Improve R&D infrastructure across the country to come up with innovative products for global markets Encourage firms focused on exports to use disruptive modern tools in product design, manufacturing and distribution Exporters need adequate capital resources to cover their risk. Address delays in receiving GST funds under the input tax credit. Modernise land and labour regulations, address infrastructure bottlenecks and open up the services sector further to trade and investment.…

India aspires to become a $10 trillion economy by 2030, and infra- structure will be a key driver in that endeavour. From 400,000 km of roads in 1951 to 5,897,671 km as of 2017, India has managed to build the world’s second-largest road network after the US. Whether the Golden Quadrilateral project of the ’90s or the Bharatmala Pariyojana in 2017, which envisages the development of economic corridors, inter corridors, feeder routes and greenfield expressways, India has followed a consistent road to development. Union road, transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari has set a target of developing 60,000 km of roads in the next five years and to take the rate of highway-building from 32 km a day to 40 km. The government has allocated Rs 111 lakh crore under…

In April 2018, the homes in Manipur’s Leisang village were finally electrified—among the last ones of India’s 590,000 villages to get electricity. One could argue that it took over 70 years for the country to take the access to the last man, but a significant milestone had finally been crossed. India inherited from their British masters the installed capacity of 1,717 MW, mostly through hydroelectric plants. India’s biggest challenge over the next five years will be to cut down on carbon emissions Barely enough to illuminate factories, homes and trading hubs in the cities, electricity was a luxury not a necessity, and extending it to the villages was simply not an option. Today, the country has 375.3 GW of installed capacity—from thermal-based (coal, oil and gas), renewable (hydro, solar, wind)…

Bridging the digital divide to avoid the creation of a class of digitally-poor citizens Creating, as per a Deloitte-Assocham report, over 8 million hotspots instead of currently available 31,000, to reach the global level of one wifi hotspot penetration per 150 people A legal framework to ensure data protection along with innovation and growth Higher internet speed. As per a 2020 Ookla report, India is #131 among 138 countries in terms of global average mobile internet speed…

INDIA FACES ENORMOUS SECURITY CHALLENGES OF THE KIND FEW OTHER DEMOCRACIES FACE. IT IS THE WORLD’S FIFTH-LARGEST SPENDER ON DEFENCE, YET THIS MEANS NOTHING BECAUSE OF A DYSFUNCTIONAL MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, AN UNREFORMED SILOED MILITARY AND A CRUSHING DEPENDENCE ON IMPORTED WEAPONS TWO-FRONT CHALLENGES Unsettled boundaries with nuclear-armed adversaries China and Pakistan State-sponsored terrorism from Pakistan and internal insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir tying down bulk of security forces in the Union territory Pressure by China along the LAC has forced the army and air force into a high state of readiness. What was a quiet border until May 2020 has now become an active border DISPUTED BOUNDARIES Lack of technology and firepower means the armed forces are heavily manpower dependent INDIA’S DEFENCE BUDGET Rs 4.7 lakh crore India’s defence budget…

Shubhang Arora, Executive Director, Yashoda Super Speciality Hospitals, talks about the measures taken at the peak of the outbreak of COVID-19 and the way forward with the vaccination drive Please share with us the journey of Yashoda Super Speciality Hospitals. The hospital is named after my grandmother Yashoda who was a cancer patient. Seeing her suffering, my father and the family thought of helping people suffering from critical illnesses. In the late 1980s-early 1990s, Ghaziabad did not have specialized healthcare hospitals. We also began with a small clinic, but over the years scaled it to three multi super-speciality hospitals in NCR. The pandemic needed immediate intervention. How did you cope with this need? We were among the first hospitals in north India to roll out measures for COVID-19 patients. For…

The Indian economy is often criticised as delivering jobless growth—from 2001 to 2011, the economy’s average growth rate was 7.7 per cent, but the job growth rate was a meagre 1.8 per cent. Reports indicate that matters may not have changed much in the past decade. According to a leaked report from the National Sample Survey Organisation, India’s unemployment rate hit a 45-year high of 6.1 per cent in 2017. However, the Union government has not approved the report, saying that data sets derived with different methodologies are not comparable. Regardless, the Covid-19 pandemic has unleashed an unprecedented job crisis. The impact has been devastating, more so because 93 per cent of the Indian work force is employed in the unorganised sector. The consequences of the lockdown, the job cuts…

Take immediate steps to end massive backlog of cases by segregating civil and criminal cases in different courts and prioritising cases based on their nature Fast-track judicial capacity-building by of filling up vacant posts, creating new and better physical infrastructure and adopting technology. The pandemic has shown that the judiciary has the bandwidth for technological evolution Increase budgetary expenditure on judiciary Initiatives must come from all three wings of governance—executive, legislative and judiciary—to implement and fast track the recommendations of the various law commissions for judicial reforms…

The 2010s were a decade which shook India as women, in both urban and rural areas, hit the streets in unprecedented numbers as a mark of protest on various issues. It began in 2012 when, for the first time, thousands of young urban women stood outside India Gate in the heart of New Delhi to protest against the brutal gang-rape of a 23-year-old woman in the capital. Images of the protesting women being dragged away by the police and blasted with tear gas remain vivid in memory because these were neither politically motivated nor organised protests. They were ordinary women who had stepped out in solidarity against rape and the poor conviction rate in crimes against women in India. This was followed by a series of protests where women led…

Six religious communities are designated as ‘minorities’ in India but it often seems that the term is just another euphemism for ‘a certain community’. Muslims are the emblematic minority in India, partly because they are by far the largest of the six notified groups—the only one with a double digit percentage share of the national population (14.2 per cent in Census 2011)—but also because of the (not unrelated) fact that they have become the quintessential ‘other’ in the prevailing cultural and political imagination of the Hindu majority. This is of course a historic dynamic sharpened by the violent communal rupture of Partition 75 years ago. However, the ascendance of majoritarian Hindutva since Narendra Modi first came to power in 2014 is arguably a new turning point in the downward fortunes…

They account for a little more than 8 per cent of India’s population, some 100 million people belonging to 700-odd communities across the country, but the designated Scheduled Tribes (STs) have borne the brunt of modern civilisation bearing down on them. Tribals constitute 40 per cent of all displaced people in the country, says an IIPA (Indian Institute of Public Administration) paper. In the past three decades, the Union government has enacted two key legislations: the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act or PESA, 1996, and the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006, to address the issues affecting ST communities. The PESA Act envisages a greater role for gram sabhas or the local community in deciding issues such as mining, land acquisition and dispute resolution. However, the Act has not been…

Seventy-three years after India won the coveted hockey gold medal at the 1948 London Olympic Games and 46 years after it won the inaugural World Cup Hockey championship (1975) in Kuala Lumpur, the country is now struggling to make it to the top three slots in India’s ‘national game’. And though, over the decades, cricket has totally upstaged hockey in India and taken over the minds and hearts of both aspiring sportspersons and the general public here, it has a very faint global footprint. According to a report titled ‘Impact of COVID-19 on Revenues of World Cricket and Indian Sports’, authored by Sundar Raman, former COO of the Indian Premier League (IPL), cricket accounts for almost 85 per cent of the Indian sports economy (IPL being a major contributor), followed…

Q. Punya Paap is a hit. Did you experience Difficult Second Album Syndrome while making it? I was not worried at all, actually. The lockdown gave me a lot of time. I was not on tour. I was not [going] outside. I was just in the studio at home and writing music. Last year, I wrote a lot. I already have half an EP ready. It was much easier than writing [my debut album] Kohinoor. I’m having fun with my music. I’m not trying too hard. I’m letting it come very naturally. Q. Whatmadeyousample Goli Maar Bheje Mein for the track Satya? [The Hindi film] Satya was my favourite movie growing up. I always had that song in my head. We used to sing it a lot. Every party had…

First Phase Water will be supplied to 3,622 villages of the Bundelkhand region through a pipeline. To make this possible, a total of 479 projects have been started at a cost of Rs 2,185 crore. Second Phase In this phase, projects costing Rs 5,555 have been launched. A population of over 4 million in 3,000 villages of Sonbhadra and Mirzapur districts will be benefited under these projects, 14 of which are for Sonbhadra and nine for Mirzapur. Third Phase #This project is meant for those areas in the State where 'Japanese encephalitis' or'acute encephalitis syndrome' are endemic or where the underground water is highly polluted with arsenic. Work on this project is slated to begin at the start of 2021. Fourth Phase #This project will be launched to serve those…

India needs to spend on infrastructure and health—the first to create jobs and the second to address the ongoing pandemic Experts call for a liberalisation of land, labour and capital markets, and an asset quality review of large NBFCs to prevent a future crisis In the short run, manufacturing needs more support, and many say there should be an effort to revive stalled infrastructure projects In the long run, land acquisition remains a major hurdle to infra projects. Some say better laws are needed to make this easier while still protecting sellers’ interests Industry leaders also call for more predictability in matters of tax and regulations…

Indian manufacturers have to become competitive enough for global markets. Improvements are needed in product design, manufacturing and distribution Sectors in which success is more likely—like pharma or automotives—should be supported A fall in compliance costs would encourage MSMEs to grow, as would improvements in infrastructure and policy certainty Greater domestic production of modern raw materials (like silicon chips) would reduce import dependency (electronic items)…

On January 7 this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi commissioned a 351-kilometre section between Khurja and Bhaupur in Uttar Pradesh for commercial operations. This marked the first phase of the Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) project. Together, the eastern and western corridors will ferry 70 per cent of the country’s freight traffic and are expected to be commissioned by 2022. The Indian Railways has long been marred by inefficient operations, slow infrastructure development and financially unviable projects. The Railway Board is seriously considering opening up its doors to private players to own and operate trains. On July 1 last year, the process of inviting private players to own, design, build, finance and operate 151 passenger trains to be run on 109 routes was initiated. Private freight trains will be roped in…

In 1951, in India’s first five year plan, efforts were made to set up a Ganga-Brahmaputra transport board for river transport. Red tape severely damaged this effort—legislation was only passed in 1986. The law was then revisited 30 years later, converting 111 river stretches into waterways, 37 of them on priority. In terms of international ports, at Independence, India gained those at Surat, Mumbai, Kochi, Chennai, Puducherry and Kolkata. Together, they had a cargo handling capacity of 10-11 MTPA (million tonnes per annum). In late 2019, the handling capacity of major Indian ports had reached 1,534.9 MPTA. In the past decades, though most ports have gained highway or railway connectivity, key transport routes have remained congested. India has 12 major and 200 non-major/ intermediate ports. Over the next decade, the…

India may have to import as much as 84 per cent of the petroleum required to meet its energy needs. But there is one fuel we have in plenty: sunshine. Most parts of the country have clear, sunny weather for 250-300 days in a year. That is now being harnessed to bring a revolution in energy that could drastically cut down the country’s dependence on fossil fuels and enable it to meet the two goals Prime Minister Narendra Modi committed to at the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. As part of its nationally determined contribution (NDC), Modi pledged that India would reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission intensity of its GDP by 33-35 per cent by 2030 from 2005 levels. India also committed to achieve 40 per cent of…

“It takes a war to make our people work together. Peace breaks them up into narrow sectional pieces. We must learn to rise above sectional interests and work for what is best for the country.” These words by Air Chief Marshal P.C. Lal from his memoirs are as relevant today as they were when they were written 36 years ago. Air Chief Marshal Lal was the chief of air staff during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war, the last conflict all three armed forces fought together. Last year, the government instituted the most comprehensive and sweeping reform of the armed forces since Independence. The most significant shake-up of the Indian armed forces took place after the 1962 border war with China. A country dependent on food imports to feed its people had…

Data from the health ministry shows that nearly half the people who have died of Covid in India had previously existing health conditions, diabetes and hypertension being among the top few. The pandemic not only highlighted the country’s dire need for more healthcare workers and better public health infrastructure but also showed how the prevalence rate of lifestyle diseases is a growing cause for concern. While several critical diseases such as polio, measles, TB, HIV and now Covid-19 have seen concentrated efforts to combat them, diabetes and heart disease aren’t even listed in the top 10 major diseases of the country. Yet, India is the diabetes capital of the world (69.9 million cases by 2025), with the number of cases doubling in the past 30 years as for heart diseases.…

Here is a sobering fact: on August 15, 2020, when India celebrated its 74th Independence Day, only 16.8 per cent, or 1 in every six, of the 191 million rural households in the country had functional tap connections that supplied them potable water for drinking and other domestic use. A majority had to depend either on a nearby hand pump or a walk to the well. The burden of collecting the water fell usually on the women and girl children of the household, resulting in loss of both time and energy. Besides, there was no guarantee that the water thus collected was potable, leading to water-borne diseases that continue to plague much of India. It is not as if successive governments since Independence have neglected this vital need. In the…

Improve conviction rate in rape cases, which is currently less than 30 per cent, and other crimes against women. Speedy trials and sentencing will act as strong deterrents Launch public awareness campaigns to encourage girls to complete school education. Dropout rates among girls remain high in secondary and higher education A quarter of women of reproductive age are undernourished. Health workers providing the right supplement at the right time can help prevent anaemia, low weight and other conditions that can harm the mother and baby Flexible working hours, women-friendly workplaces, gender-neutral hiring practices and more entrepreneurial opportunities can help bring more women back to work…

Introduce a comprehensive anti-discrimination law to penalise discriminatory practices in the private as well as public sector Incentivise higher education for Muslims with scholarships and subsidies Increase the recruitment of Muslims to central government and public sector, and to the police force where their absence has political consequences Amend the 1950 presidential order which now reserves Dalit status—and access to affirmative action benefits—only for Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists End the politics of polarisation and its most pernicious expression in laws and popular campaigns that stigmatise Muslims and provoke violence and intimidation against them…

The runaway show of strength on January 26, leading to incidents of violence in the capital and the siege of the Red Fort, has forced the protesting farmers on the back foot. It has also broken their ranks, with several farm leaders who were committed—as agreed in negotiations with the government—to a peaceful tractor rally on Republic Day, straining to distance themselves from the renegade leaders. This lot, they insist, hijacked plans to continue the peaceful resistance till the government yielded to their demand for a repeal, nothing less, of the contentious new farm laws. Fearing that the violent incidents on the day may have cost them public sympathy and realising fully well that the police and government will plan retribution, the Samyunkt Kisan Morcha (SKM), an umbrella grouping of…

We, the people of India, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic, republic and to secure to all its citizens: Justice, social, economic and political; Liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; Equality of status and of opportunity, and to promote among them all, Fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the nation.” With this Preamble of noble objectives, India as a nation formally adopted the Constitution on January 26, 1950, declaring itself a Republic. Now, 71 years later, as we celebrated the day with a dazzling display of India’s might and cultural diversity (though marred later by rampaging farmer protests), it was time not just to look back and assess what we have achieved so far and…

GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT (% CHANGE, 1961-2021) Before the pandemic hit, GDP growth had slumped to 4.2 per cent in 2019 PER CAPITA INCOME (% CHANGE, 1961-2021) Personal income growth has been sliding in recent years FOREIGN EXCHANGE (BILLION) Forex reserves have soared in the past decade, from $304 bn in 2010 to $475 bn in 2019 EMPLOYMENT (MILLIONS) In Q2 2020, employment crashed from its trendline of 400 mn to 328 mn INFLATION (CPI, %) At 6.6 per cent in June 2020, high inflation depresses spending 0.9 % Average GDP growth rate, pre-Independence 6.1 Average GDP growth % rate in the 1990s, post-liberalisation 7.7 % Estimated GDP growth in 2020-21…

In the past few decades, the contribution of India’s services sector to its GDP has grown significantly, from between 25 and 30 per cent in 1950-51 to around 55 per cent today. According to projections from the International Labour Organization, the services sector became India’s largest employer in 2019. This also shows the skew of the economy—India missed out on manufacturing-led growth, with services emerging as the main job creator. This sector encompasses healthcare, IT (information technology), tourism, hospitality and retail, among others. The pandemic was a body blow to several of these sub sectors, such as travel and tourism and on-ground retail, but for others like healthcare and IT, it proved a moment for business models to pivot. From medical consultations going online to consultants quickly switching to work-from-home…

IMPORTS WEIGH HEAVY A GROWING TRADE IMBALANCE HAS BEEN THE ORDER OF THE DAY India’s foreign trade policy can be divided into three phases: the 1950-75 period that saw tight controls, 1976-91 which witnessed some liberalisation, particularly the last 5-7 years, and 1992 onwards which saw the full onset of liberalisation. Although the government had introduced quantitative import controls in May 1940 to conserve foreign exchange during World War II, starting 1947 the government introduced restrictions on the rate at which foreign exchange could be run down. The policies those days were a mix of liberalisation and tighter controls, says economist Arvind Panagariya in a Brookings Institute research paper in 2004. Following a balance-of-payments crisis in 1956-57, India went back to comprehensive import controls. The principle of indigenous availability prevailed, so…

Four airlines operated nine flights to transport 5.65 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine from Pune to 13 cities as India prepared to vaccinate its billion-strong citizenry. The commendable feat was made possible by the country’s aviation sector, recovering from one of the harshest setbacks in recent times. From transporting 19 million passengers in 1997 to 317 million passengers in FY19, Indian aviation has come a long way for a sector that was deregulated only in 1991. So much so that we are set to surpass the United Kingdom to become the world’s third largest aviation market by 2024. The ministry of civil aviation’s vision document estimates air passenger traffic to grow six-fold by 2040. The number of operational airports is expected to double to around 200 from 101. The top…

EVEN TODAY, ONLY TWO PER CENT OF FREIGHT TRAVELS ON INLAND WATERWAYS IN 1950 Five functional waterways, but no authority to develop it Less than 0.5 per cent of inland freight transported on these No multi-modal freight infrastructure No major ports; states would handle cargo movement independently 50 minor and intermediate ports handled by coastal states TODAY There are 111 stretches declared national waterways, with 34 being completed on priority Two per cent of inland freight transported on these Sagarmala will integrate highways, railways and ports There are today 12 major ports that together handle 700 million tonnes per year 187 minor and intermediate ports handled by coastal states…

When the lockdown was announced on March 24, 2020, Asha, a domestic worker, didn’t think it would go beyond the initial 21 days. After months of speculation, she finally packed her bags and left with her two daughters for Kolkata. Many of the houses she worked in had stopped calling their help, and moving back home meant she could save on rent, even as her daughters continued their education through online classes. Asha’s smartphone doubled up for classes and as a source of entertainment for her girls. She may have been earning about Rs 15,000 a month but for her a smartphone is now a necessity. Asha’s story illustrates the evolution of India’s telecom story and what it has meant for millions of Indians. From the days when having a…

Ensure success of the Aatmanirbhar Bharat initiative by boosting indigenous defence production and making India a hub of defence manufacturing Completeintegration of armed forces from 17 single-service commands into five integrated theatres Realise the goal of a turnover of $25 billion (Rs 1.8 lakh crore) in defence manufacturing in the next five years. This includes military hardware exports worth $5 billion (Rs 36,460 crore) Commitment of orders of Rs 50,000 crore to Indian industry each year and hiked FDI in defence under the automatic route from 49% to 74% Integrated capability development plan to prioritise acquisition of military hardware. Institute a defence capital acquisition plan to speed up and harmonise these acquisitions…

600,000 neonates die every year in India, the highest in the world. NHP 2017 aims to cut mortality rate to 16 (per 1,000 babies born) by 2025 India has to raise health spends, currently one of the lowest in the world, to improve public health facilities and access to healthcare Only 15% of population is covered by health insurance, says NSS 2014. In 2015, 8% of population was pushed into poverty by out-of-pocket payments for healthcare. Can Ayushman Bharat deliver? Lifestyle diseases like diabetes, heart disease are growing alarmingly. UN estimates economic costs for India at $6.2 trillion for 2012-2030 There is a national shortage of 82% for doctors with specialisation. Improved medical education and incentives for doctors to work in the public sector could help improve the numbers…

GENDER DISPARITY India’s sex ratio, steadily declining since independence, improved marginally only in the past decade (per thousand males) IN HARM’S WAY The rate of crimes against women has more than tripled in the past decade (per 100,000 women) 46 million Girls went missing in India—out of the 142 million globally in the past 50 years—due to pre and postnatal sex selection, says UNFPA 41% Rise in number of missing girl children in the past five years EXPLOITED AT WORK While the pay gap with men has reduced, largely in urban areas, fewer women are part of the workforce now WRITING ON THE WALL Despite higher literacy, 59 per cent of India’s 313 million illiterate people are women 55% Of girls in the present married population got married in the…

The Scheduled Castes (SCs), who number around 1,300 communities and account for nearly 200 million people or 16 per cent of India’s population (2011 census), are among the most marginalised in terms of socioeconomic indicators. ‘Untouchability’ has been abolished, but the mainstreaming of SCs through socio-economic improvement—alongside attitudinal changes in society—is a work in progress for the Republic after seven decades. The efforts to improve their lot have been through reservation in education and political and government offices and, more recently, through economic upliftment and greater participation in entrepreneurship. First, a look at the achievements. In 1961, literacy among SCs stood at 10.2 per cent; by 2011, it had jumped to 66 per cent. In terms of occupying high offices, India has had two presidents hailing from the SC community.…

Consider this. With 40,813 doctoral degrees in science and engineering granted in 2018, India ranks third globally in the number of PhD graduates in these fields every year, after the US and China. In terms of annual research publications, India ranks fifth, with a 5.4 per cent share (after the US, China, the UK and Germany, which have 21.8 per cent, 18.7 per cent, 6.5 per cent and 6.2 per cent shares, respectively). But when it comes to new patents, India lags badly. In 1976-77, the number of Indian patents in force was 2,746. By 2017-18, that number had risen to 8,830. In the same period, the number of international patents in India rose from 19,780 to 47,934. One major reason is simply spending. Since 2012-13, national annual expenditure on…