Does India copy more than it invents?

It is said at dinner tables, in comment threads and sometimes in classrooms: Indians copy, others invent. Our films are remakes, our gadgets are imported, our Constitution was borrowed. A claim this broad can be tested, because much of it is on the record. The government counts what the country spends on research and who files its patents. The courts have ruled on what counts as copying. And the Constituent Assembly answered the charge about the Constitution in 1948. This essay puts the claim to that record.

What would count as evidence?

Two things are easily run together. To copy is to reproduce someone else's work. To borrow is to take an idea, a design or a method and build on it, which is how most invention happens; the law draws the same line, as the section on films shows. So the test is not whether India borrows, since every country does, but whether it adds anything of its own, and how much.

Three kinds of record can answer that:

• Inputs: how much money and how many people a country puts into research.
• Outputs: patents filed by its own people, and international rankings of what research produces.
• Cases: particular inventions and works. One case is enough to refute “everything”; no handful of cases can show “a lot”.

Each has limits. A patent application is a claim to an invention, not proof that it works or matters. A ranking is a composite of indicators its authors chose. Where the record cannot measure something, such as originality in art, this essay says so rather than guess.

How much does India spend on research?

Less than every country the government compared it with, and far less than its own target. The usual measure is GERD, gross expenditure on research and development: everything spent on research in a year, by government, business, universities and others, as a share of the country's GDP (gross domestic product: the value of everything it produces in a year).

In February 2022 the Ministry of Science and Technology told Parliament that India's GERD had stayed at about 0.7% of GDP for three years, and set it beside other countries' figures. The release gives no year for theirs, so read the chart as the government's own comparison rather than a table for a single year.

Later figures move little. A written answer to Parliament in 2025 gave 0.66% for 2018-19 and 2019-20 and 0.64% for 2020-21, “below global average and lower than countries like China, South Korea and US”. In 2026 the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser published a revised series, which puts India's GERD at 0.84% of GDP in 2023-24. Even on the revised figure, India spends less than half the 2% it set itself. The target is India's own: the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy of 2013 “envisages increasing R&D expenditure to 2% of GDP”, as the government told the Rajya Sabha in 2015.

A share of GDP hides size, so here is the same spending in dollars. The Department of Science and Technology compares countries in PPP dollars: dollars adjusted for prices in each country (purchasing power parity), so that a dollar stands for the same amount of goods and work everywhere. Most things cost less in India, so this measure counts India's spending for more than market exchange rates would.

In total, India is a large spender, because it is a large country. It spent 57.9 billion PPP dollars on research in 2020-21, which the Department ranks seventh in the world, ahead of the UK, Russia, Brazil, Italy, Canada, Spain and Australia. Per person, it spent 42 PPP dollars a year. China spent 413, nearly ten times as much; South Korea 2,180 and the US 2,184, more than fifty times as much.

Who spends matters as much as how much. In the same 2025 answer the government said that in China, South Korea and the US the private sector accounts for more than 70% of research spending, against about 36% in India. The revised series of 2026 puts the private sector's share at 51.85% in 2023-24. On either figure, Indian business carries less of the country's research than business does in China, South Korea and the US.

And people. In 2020 India had 262 researchers for every million people, up from 110 in 2000, by the count of the Department of Science and Technology. The same report gives China 1,585, and South Korea, which topped its list, 8,714.

On inputs, then, the claim's spirit holds. India puts far less into invention than the countries it compares itself with.

Who files India's patents?

For years, mostly foreigners; now, mostly Indians. In January to March 2022, Indian applicants filed 10,706 patent applications in India and foreign applicants 9,090. The government announced it as the first time in eleven years that Indian applicants had filed more. In 2023, by the count of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), residents filed 55.2% of the patent applications made at India's patent office, the first year in which they filed more than half. In 2024-25 the Patent Office's annual report puts the Indian share at 61.79%, in a year when filings grew by 19.75%.

Two cautions. The counts are on different bases (a quarter, a calendar year, a financial year; WIPO's count and the Patent Office's), so they show a direction, not a precise series. And applications count claims, not inventions that work. Still, the direction is plain. The claim had support here for the eleven years before 2022, when foreign applicants out-filed Indian ones. It no longer does.

Does India get little out of its research?

No. By the best-known international measure, it gets more out than it puts in. The Global Innovation Index, published each year by WIPO, ranks economies on dozens of indicators, split into inputs (institutions, people and research, infrastructure, markets, business) and outputs (knowledge and technology, and creative work).

In 2025 India ranked 38th of 139 economies, up from 81st in 2015. It ranked 52nd on inputs and 32nd on outputs. WIPO counts India as an innovation overperformer for its level of development, ranking above what its income would predict, for the fifteenth year running, and ranks it first in the world for exports of ICT (information and communication technology) services.

The gap runs the opposite way to the claim. India's weakness, on this measure, is in what it puts into research, not in what it makes of it.

What has India invented?

Cases cannot settle “how much”, but they can refute “nothing”. Three, from the official record:

• Science. C. V. Raman received the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1930 “for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him”: when light passes through a substance, a small part of the scattered light comes out at a different wavelength.
• Payments. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI), built by the National Payments Corporation of India and launched in April 2016 under the Reserve Bank's oversight, sends money instantly from a phone to an address, a mobile number or a QR code. It started with 21 banks and handled 1.78 crore transactions in 2016-17; in 2025-26 it handled more than 24,162 crore. The government describes it as the world's largest real-time payments platform.
• Space. ISRO's Mars Orbiter Mission, launched on 5 November 2013, entered orbit around Mars on 24 September 2014, on its first attempt, making ISRO the fourth space agency to reach Mars orbit. (Why Chandrayaan-3 took forty days to reach the Moon is another piece of Indian engineering, worked through on this blog.)

Each was built on others' work: Raman's on the physics of light, UPI on banking networks, the Mars mission on the laws of orbits worked out by Kepler and Newton. That is not a mark against them. It is what invention looks like everywhere.

Was the Constitution copied?

It borrowed openly, and its chief drafter defended the borrowing on the record. When B. R. Ambedkar moved the Draft Constitution in the Constituent Assembly on 4 November 1948, he took the charge head on. Critics had said that the draft reproduced much of the Government of India Act, 1935, and borrowed the rest. He replied: “One likes to ask whether there can be anything new in a Constitution framed at this hour in the history of the world.”

By then, he argued, the main ideas of a constitution were common ground, and “all Constitutions in their main provisions must look similar”. “The only new things, if there can be any, in a Constitution framed so late in the day are the variations made to remove the faults and to accommodate it to the needs of the country.” The charge of “a blind copy”, he said, “is based, I am sure, on an inadequate study of the Draft Constitution.”

One of the Constitution's most important rules is not in its text at all. In Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, decided on 24 April 1973 by thirteen judges, seven to six, the Supreme Court held that Parliament's power to amend the Constitution under Article 368 does not extend to altering its basic structure. Article 368 does not say so. The limit is the Court's reading of the Constitution, not words written in it.

On polity the record supports “borrowed” and refutes “copied”: the borrowing was declared, debated and defended, and the Constitution has since grown rules of its own.

Are Indian films copies?

Here the record is thinnest, and the claim is made most often. No official body counts remakes or measures originality in film, music or art, so neither the claim nor its denial can be proved with numbers. What the record does hold is where the law draws the line, and some recognition from abroad.

The line comes from the Supreme Court. In R. G. Anand v. Delux Films (1978), a playwright said that the film New Delhi copied his play Hum Hindustani. The Court held that there can be no copyright in an idea, only in the way it is expressed, and set a test: whether a viewer who has seen both comes away with an “unmistakable impression” that one is a copy of the other. Finding no such impression, it dismissed the appeal. In law, two films built on the same idea are not copies; a film copies when it takes the way another work tells its story.

And recognition. In 1992 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave Satyajit Ray an Honorary Award for his “rare mastery of the art of motion pictures”; he accepted it on tape from Calcutta. In 2023 “Naatu Naatu”, from the Telugu film RRR, with music by M. M. Keeravaani and lyrics by Chandrabose, won the Oscar for Best Original Song, the first song from an Indian film to win in that category.

None of this shows that Indian cinema never copies. It shows that “everything” is wrong, and that the fair form of the complaint is about particular films, which the law already lets an author take to court.

Why is the gap there?

The record gives its own reasons, and they are about investment, not ability. The government's answers to Parliament point to low spending and a small private share; the Department of Science and Technology's figures show few researchers for the country's size. The National Education Policy of 2020 adds a diagnosis about schooling: among its principles is an emphasis on “conceptual understanding rather than rote learning and learning-for-exams”, and it would cut syllabus content to its core essentials to make space for critical thinking.

That last reason is the one a reader preparing for an exam can act on. “Learning-for-exams” is the policy's own phrase. Testing a claim before repeating it, as this essay has tried to do, is a different habit, and research runs on it.

The verdict

So does India copy more than it invents? The record does not support the claim as it is usually made. Indians file most of India's patents, India's research yields more than its inputs predict, and the cases are there. But the complaint points at something true. A country that spends well under 1% of its income on research, when it has asked itself for 2%, will invent less than it could.

The record does not show that Indians cannot invent. It shows that India pays for less invention than it says it wants.