For decades, philanthropy in India has been overwhelmingly oriented toward faith-based initiatives, with nearly half of all private donations flowing to religious organizations and temples rather than secular, long-term public good initiatives. Today, that long-standing pattern is shifting dramatically, as a new cohort of the nation’s billionaires and business leaders are directing hundreds of millions of dollars into foundational scientific research, academic infrastructure, and talent development — marking a pivotal turning point for India’s innovation ecosystem.
The trend kicked off into the public eye earlier this year, when Indian-American theoretical physicist Jainendra Jain, a 2025 Wolf Prize co-recipient renowned for his revolutionary work in quantum physics, got an unexpected outreach from Abhishek Lodha, CEO of Mumbai-based real estate giant Lodha Group. Lodha, the developer behind Mumbai’s iconic gold-hued Trump Tower that overlooks the Arabian Sea, offered Jain the position of founding director for a new theoretical physics institute to be built in Mumbai. Jain, a professor at Penn State University, said he was shocked by the offer. “I was pleasantly surprised someone building skyscrapers would suddenly be interested in putting money into fundamental sciences. It’s a common thing to do for very rich people in the US, but not so much in India,” Jain told the BBC at the institute’s glitzy launch event in late May. Lodha has committed $100 million to launch and sustain the institute over the next eight to 10 years, with a mission to let researchers spend years pursuing high-quality foundational work without pressure for immediate commercial outcomes, with the long-term goal of fostering homegrown innovation, commercialization, and domestic technology development.
Lodha’s initiative is far from an isolated case. Just weeks after the institute’s launch, Rajiv Bajaj, heir to one of India’s oldest industrial dynasties, launched the nation’s largest engineering scholarship program for women, offering up to 800,000 rupees (nearly $9,000) per recipient to cover education costs at top-tier Indian universities. Other leading Indian business leaders have made similar commitments in recent years: Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan has dedicated funding to advanced brain research; pharmaceutical billionaire Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw launched a cutting-edge frontier biology laboratory in 2022 to advance bioscience innovation; and at least six additional tech billionaires based in Bengaluru — India’s equivalent of Silicon Valley — have pledged major sums to research projects ranging from robotic astronomy to multi-specialty medical research.
Experts frame this growing wave of giving as a reflection of a new consensus among India’s wealthy: a nation’s long-term global competitiveness is inextricably tied to its strength in foundational science. “No great nation has thrived without a deep scientific base. And we believe India produces great minds. So it’s not for a shortage of talent that this has not yet taken off, but a shortage of infrastructure,” Lodha explained.
This shift comes at a critical juncture for India’s development trajectory. For years, analysts have raised concerns that India has fallen behind global peers in cutting-edge frontier innovation, from artificial intelligence to advanced robotics. The nation’s gross spending on research and development hovers at just 0.6% to 0.7% of GDP, far lower than major economies like China, South Korea, and the United States. Critically, the private sector contributes only 36% of India’s total R&D spending, compared to over 70% in most major developed economies. Mazumdar-Shaw, who has supported scientific initiatives across India and globally, notes that for decades, India relied almost exclusively on limited government funding for academic and scientific institutions, leaving many under-resourced. “All great academic institutions in the world from Harvard to MIT and Stanford have been built with philanthropic support. In India the whole approach so far has been that this is the government’s job,” she said. That long-held assumption is now being overturned.
While early 20th century business dynasties like the Tatas did pioneer American-style philanthropic investment in science — establishing landmark institutions such as the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai and the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru — there was a decades-long gap in large-scale private science giving after that early wave. Today’s resurgence is being driven by two distinct groups of modern givers: the current generation of leaders from long-established business families, and first-generation tech wealth creators, according to Neera Nundy, co-founder of Dasra, a nonprofit that advises organizations on philanthropic strategy. “This cohort is more tech-driven, data-oriented, and outcomes-focused, which naturally aligns with investments in science, innovation, and research-led solutions,” Nundy explained.
Even with the high-profile new commitments, however, philanthropic funding for science and innovation still lags far behind more traditional popular causes like education and healthcare, which continue to capture the majority of private giving in India. Given India’s low per-capita income and competing urgent development priorities, this imbalance is not surprising, Nundy notes. India’s research ecosystem also faces structural barriers, including weak collaboration between industry and academia, and a growing gap between the skills graduates produce and the needs of cutting-edge research and industry. Still, the long-term potential for growth in science-focused philanthropy is substantial. Nundy estimates that Indian family philanthropists alone have the capacity to give an additional $14 to 15 billion by fiscal year 2030. How much of that will flow to science will depend on building a robust, trusted ecosystem that can support large-scale, long-term scientific investment, she says.
Mazumdar-Shaw argues that sectors with natural alignments between scientific research and business growth, such as pharmaceuticals, should lead this shift. “India’s pharma companies are not doing cutting-edge research. But the next value-creation opportunity for them lies in innovative drugs, for which a lot more funding needs to come into research institutions,” she explained.
For Lodha, this shift in giving is a natural evolution of India’s development. “This is an evolution. A society in need of upliftment was met with philanthropy of service and now naturally you’ll see the trend shift to philanthropy of excellence,” he says.