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Atmanirbhar by Design: Route to India’s Manufacturing Renaissance
Articles- Jul 28,25
For the success of Viksit Bharat 2047, the capital-goods sector needs to grow by tenfold from present Rs 5.5 trillion to Rs 60 trillion within two decades. Yogesh Pandit, Director of Product Acceleration at FSID at IISc, highlights how India’s manufacturing sector can undergoing a pivotal transformation driven by design-led innovation and policy support.
India’s shop floors are entering a decisive new phase. The HSBC Manufacturing PMI touched 58.4 in June 2025—its strongest showing in fourteen months—just as the Union Budget nearly doubled allocations for high-tech sectors under the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme. The figures confirm what plant managers have sensed for months: output is rising and order books are fattening. Yet the deeper story lies not in extra shifts or new assembly lines, but in how efficiently fresh ideas are being shepherded from sketchpad to shipping dock. That journey, traditionally the sector’s Achilles heel, is now being rewritten for competitiveness.
India’s growth ambition
Policy roadmaps from Make in India to Viksit Bharat 2047 envision manufacturing contributing 25 per cent to a projected $ 30 trillion GDP by mid-century. Achieving this ambition requires lifting the capital-goods sector from about Rs 5.5 trillion today to well above Rs 60 trillion within two decades—a tenfold leap that cannot be met through simple capacity expansion. The sector must simultaneously enhance technology and design capabilities, shorten development cycles, and manufacture to global regulatory and quality standards.
Encouragingly, PMI’s latest readings show demand for Indian intermediate goods growing at its fastest rate since 2005, driven by export orders and a record pace of hiring. These gains will endure only if the innovation pipeline expands in step with market appetite.
Talk to any engineering chief and recurring themes emerge: fragmented prototyping facilities, thinly capitalised MSMEs, certification hurdles, and a shortage of industrial-design talent. India’s Ministry of Heavy Industries has proactively addressed these gaps by investing in accelerator models for rotating machinery and other capital-goods niches. Without a structured “last-mile” partner, promising ideas risk burning cash on retooling, while global buyers look elsewhere.
Role of accelerators
Over the last eighteen months, a new generation of domain-focused accelerators has begun reshaping India’s innovation landscape. Among these, Pravriddhi—launched by IISc’s Foundation for Science, Innovation and Development (FSID)—stands out as a model of how market-driven, design-led product acceleration can bridge the gap between academic research and industrial relevance.
By providing shared access to advanced labs and actively connecting innovators with mentors, investors, and technology partners, Pravriddhi has enabled MSMEs to move from development to commercialisation at unprecedented speed. Its pilot cohort in high-speed rotating machinery, for instance, produced market-ready products in just 30 months, with most of them beta-tested at customer facilities. The cohort generated 16 patents valued at over Rs 2.5 billion—clear evidence of how structured acceleration can translate technical ingenuity into market impact.
These efforts are reinforced by complementary programmes such as those run by NASSCOM CoE and Startup India, which focus on IoT, industrial AI, and other emerging domains. By filling critical resource gaps for smaller hardware innovators—through funding, expertise, industry networks, and market linkages—these initiatives are making even capital-intensive product development viable for Indian firms.
What sets this new wave of accelerators apart from traditional incubation models are three defining characteristics:
1. Shared access to infrastructure that individual firms could not afford on their own.
2. A deliberate blurring of boundaries between academia, industry, and finance, enabling faster feedback and iteration.
3. Funding mechanisms that reward tangible milestones and validated progress rather than just promising ideas.
Bridging innovation gaps
For product managers, plant managers, and production heads, product accelerators are emerging as a strategic lever with direct implications for competitiveness and supply chain resilience.
Consider a Tier-2 supplier prototyping critical components within an accelerator such as Pravriddhi: access to advanced machining and testing infrastructure, combined with mentorship from academia and industry veterans, can shorten development cycles and help firms achieve international quality benchmarks in months rather than years. OEMs benefit by securing a reliable, homegrown supply base for precision subsystems, reducing import dependence in traditionally weak segments.
The benefits extend beyond supplier development. Accelerators foster collaborative innovation between MSMEs and established manufacturers. By co-developing systems, subsystems, or process improvements, production teams can integrate new solutions into their lines with minimal disruption—reducing changeover times, increasing roll-out volumes, and responding more effectively to shifting market demands. Early pilot runs in accelerator labs also help engineers de-risk the adoption of emerging technologies, whether AI-driven quality inspection or additive-manufactured jigs, before committing to full-scale deployment.
For OEMs, the opportunity lies in proactive partnership. Embedding specific market requirements into accelerator cohorts ensures that innovation aligns with customer needs. Clear demand signals help MSMEs prioritise manufacturability and scalability over novelty, increasing the likelihood of successful scale-up.
MSMEs, meanwhile, can treat accelerator labs as extensions of their own R&D departments. Advanced equipment and other capital-intensive assets become available on a pay-per-use basis, dramatically lowering the barriers to iterative prototyping and validation. This shared-infrastructure model is particularly valuable for suppliers seeking to move up the value chain without investing heavily in standalone facilities.
Investors and financial institutions also have a critical role. Technology innovation demands patient risk capital attuned to the realities of product development—milestone-based funding, longer gestation periods, and tolerance for technical risk. Performance-linked tranches that reward validated progress can bridge the notorious “valley of death” between lab and market.
On the policy front, expanding PLI-type incentives to cover prototyping and pilot production would remove some of the most acute bottlenecks in scaling new technologies. Streamlining certification pathways—particularly for safety-critical components in aerospace, medical devices, automotive, and other strategic sectors—would further accelerate time-to-market for Indian innovators.
Factory upgrades and capacity expansion alone will not secure India’s position as a global manufacturing leader. True industrial self-reliance and global recognition will belong to those who can consistently convert indigenous R&D into market-ready, world-class products. Product accelerators, with their blend of technical infrastructure, cross-sector collaboration, and milestone-based funding, are proving to be vital enablers of this transition.
Momentum is building. Plans are underway to expand Pravriddhi’s reach, creating a national network that democratises access to world-class facilities for innovators across India. The strong response to recent accelerator cohorts—with hundreds of applications for limited slots—signals both the pent-up demand for structured support and the readiness of Indian engineering talent to compete globally.
If corporate leaders continue to engage with these platforms—by articulating real-world challenges, offering demand assurance, and co-investing in pilot runs—and if policymakers further reduce barriers to early-stage scaling, India’s manufacturing sector can transition from production muscle to product mastery in remarkably little time. The foundation is laid; the time to act is now.
About the author:
Yogesh Pandit, Director of Product Acceleration at Foundation for Science Innovation and Development (FSID) at Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, lead Pravriddhi – a national-scale product accelerator launched by FSID. Pandit brings extensive experience in bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and market-ready solutions. He’s creating an ecosystem where MSMEs can go from labs to launchpads.
Atmanirbhar Bharat
Manufacturing Renaissance
Yogesh Pandit
Foundation for Science Innovation and Development
Indian Institute of Science
IISc
Product Accelerators
Pravriddhi
Make in India
Innovation Ecosystem
MSMEs
Production Linked Incentive
PLI Scheme
Viksit Bharat 2047
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