Fuck the hardware math.
This is bigger than Zoho. It’s a whole country refusing to invest in its own future.
India’s top software firms - TCS, Infosys, HCL, et al - spend about 1% of revenue on R&D against a 14% global tech company average. It’s not shortage of FCF - these companies are sitting on billions of it.
The money exists. The will doesn’t.
Zoom out and it’s worse. The numbers really tell a story that’s sad and laughable.
R&D spending, ranked by share of GDP (totals in PPP dollars):
Israel: 6.0% ($30 bn)
South Korea: 5.0% ($139 bn)
US: 3.6% ($923 bn)
Japan: 3.4% ($201 bn)
Germany: 3.1% ($175 bn)
China: 2.6% ($812 bn)
Turkey: 1.4% ($36 bn)
Brazil: 1.3% ($50 bn)
Russia: 1.1% ($48 bn)
India: 0.64% ($58 to 75 bn)
We are just not a poor country playing catchup, and we are not the smallest spender on that list in absolute terms. But for a $4 trillion economy, the %age sucks. We have the scale. We just refuse to use it. Dead last on intensity, below Russia, heck even below Brazil & Turkey.
And the private sector tells the real story. Business funds between 75-79% of R&D in the US, China, Japan and Korea. In India? Just 36%.
Do nite, these are PPP numbers. Strip that cushion and that’s when you see it naked: our entire private sector R&D, at market exchange rates, is under $7 bn. Less than what a single large US or Chinese tech firm spends in one year.
That’s the hole we’re trying to climb out of.
And we are fucking scratching the bottom of the barrel.
The frugality you’re roasting Vembu for isn’t a Vembu quirk. It’s the sector’s default setting - and the country’s.
The IT majors will say their ER&D is client funded engineering services, not own IP research. Which is exactly the damn point. Labour arbitrage is not the same as building out own models. Renting out our engineers is not sovereignty.
So will the state machinery wake up, or keep playing bystander?
What it should do, even now: a serious, weighted R&D tax deduction that actually moves capital. National GPU compute at real scale (the IndiaAI Mission’s ~38,000 GPUs is a joke of a rounding error next to a single frontier cluster). And kill the never ending import red tape that turns buying a GPU into a months long customs ordeal.
We’ve sat on our arse for decades. Late beats never, but let’s stop pretending that rhetoric and tokenism is strategy. We are consumed by electoral politics theatre, freebie drama, an ease of doing business that isn’t, and an abysmal, if not zilch investment in education at every level.
But sure. Achhe din. Sab changa si. That’s the lollipop we will keep sucking.
I say all this as someone who has bet on this country his whole life and still does. That is exactly why it stings.
Frustrated and sad as hell.
🤬🤬😢😢🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️
Sir, with due respect a base PC for some kids to even play around needs a GPU with 24 GB VRAM and probably cost around 3 lakh minimum.
But you are so hell bent on not taking capital and sticking to anemic cash flow that zoho can't ever offer something like Google colab?