HT Bureau
GUWAHATI, May 4: Tarun Mehta, the CEO of Ather Energy, emphasised the critical need for India to boost its investment in Research and Development (R&D) to spur economic growth. He lays emphasis on the need for entrepreneurs to target R&D of a million engineers in India in all critical sectors. In addition, he also spoke of the expansive investment made by the Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD in R&D and its growing team of engineers.
Mehta reiterated that China’s success in technological progress, particularly in sectors like electric vehicles, is a result of substantial R&D investments. He pointed out that BYD now boasts a larger R&D team than the entire auto industry outside of China, thus indicating the pivotal role of R&D in driving industrial competitiveness. He mentioned, “An R&D team size approaching one lakh people with some 20-30K engineers hired last year alone! Almost 10 percent of their revenue is spent on R&D, even at the scale of USD 40-50 billion in annual revenues,”.
“Given the demographic advantage we are sitting on, our policy focus on R&D needs to go up in an immense way. Remember, suppliers come and set up capacities where OEMs produce. OEMs produce where their new product development (NPD) happens. And NPD happens where there are engineers. That’s why China today wins the NPD game so that it can continue to maintain its eventual manufacturing advantage,” he wrote on X.
He said that often, Indian companies are satisfied seeing just a 3-4 percent R&D spend but we need to focus a lot on the numbers, otherwise no one can beat a 10-100X numbers advantage. To align with India’s ambitious economic goals of becoming a USD 10 trillion economy in the coming decade, Mehta emphasizes on the importance of allocating at least 10%-15% of the total investment in R&D initiatives, across sectors. Additionally, he underscored the need for the cultivation of a strong engineering talent pool, contributing towards India’s technological advancements.
In essence, Mehta asserts that R&D paves the way to progress; an Indian product focused company with a million engineers is not too far fetched a vision and is pretty much imminent, with spends amounting to almost $40–50B per year, which is similar to the spends of big tech players in the US. “Throw enough engineering muscle at a problem. Eventually progress.” he says.
