More on India's R&D Progress

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India ’s now established itself as a major innovation hub. In the last 15 years, over 10,000 patents were filed. A large portion of these were filed by 150 MNCs. The Intel R&D centre has filed 68 patents till now — 30 in the last year alone. “We’re doing stuff that’s critical for the long-term success of the company, as well as working on the current ‘jewels’ of the company,” says Ketan Sampat, president, Intel India .

Texas Instruments was the first MNC to tap India in 1985, after which came companies like GE, Motorola, Intel and Philips, followed by IBM, and Cisco. Even smaller MNCs like Techbooks and Google are now making a beeline for India . These set-ups are fast becoming centres of innovation, and attaining a far greater importance in the larger scheme of things. For example, IBM set up IRL in 1998, and today 70 researchers are working on projects ranging from bioinformatics to media mining, from eCoupons to grid computing and speech recognition for Indian languages. “A lot of the technology we develop is crucial to the IBM products globally,” says Dr P Gopalakrishnan, director, IBM India Research Lab.

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