Washington, October 7:

India is increasingly becoming a top global innovator for high-tech products and services, states a World Bank report recommending new ways be explored to leverage the entrepreneurs and technologists of its diaspora.

Some two per cent of Indians living abroad together earn almost 23rd of India’s GDP, notes the report — ‘Unleashing India’s Innovation’. It emphasises how creating and commercialising ‘new to the world knowledge’, as well as diffusing and absorbing existing knowledge can help India to sustain faster growth.

To spur broad innovation efforts, more needs to be done to increase competition, build stronger skills, improve information infrastructure, and provide more public and private finance for R&D and its commercialisation, it states.

“The world has acknowledged India’s R&D potential and more than 300 multinational corporations have set up R&D and technical centres in India,” said Isabel Guerrero, World Bank country director for India.

Innovation in India must be thought of as improving practices across the entire economy. While India is emerging as a top global innovator in sectors such as biotechnology and information technology, less than three per cent of the Indian workforce is in the modern private sector, while roughly 90 per cent remains in the informal sector. “The disparities in productivity levels across firms within manufacturing sectors is wider in India than in China, Mexico, the Russian Federation, and the Republic of Korea,” said Mark Dutz, World Bank senior economist and editor of the report.

“The output of the economy could increase more than five-fold if all enterprises could achieve national best practices based on knowledge already in use in India.” The report also stresses that new domestic R&D and knowledge needs to be better converted to commercial use. Of the top 50 applicants for patents in India between 1995 and 2005, 44 were foreign firms. Only two were private Indian firms. India has one of the largest systems of higher learning in the world, with some institutions of world-class quality. But, India’s small numbers of high-quality institutions are not enough to meet the country’s growing demand for skilled personnel.

To maintain its share of global knowledge services, India will need 2.3 million knowledge professionals by 2010. Instead it may face a deficit of 0.5 million workers. Higher education system therefore needs to respond adequately to rapidly changing needs.

Actions are needed to promote commercialisation and to stren-gthen links among industries, universities and R&D laboratories.