Pathak says 400 research-fund files are in review and the call is shut

India's Research, Development and Innovation Fund has about 400 applications under review, and the call for new proposals is shut until that pile is cleared, the secretary of the Technology Development Board said on Tuesday.

Rajesh Kumar Pathak told the Economic Times that the board closed the call because applications had piled up faster than the investment committee could finish the techno-commercial checks. Once the current set is screened, the call will reopen. He said the board had enough proposals in hand. The fund, a 1 lakh crore rupee programme, was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in November 2025 to put patient capital into private research.

Pathak tied the fund to the 2047 development target and to the line that a society does not become a developed economy without science and technology spending. He also gave the split the board is working against: private firms account for about 30 percent of the country's research spending, and overall spending is about 0.8 percent of revenue on the figure he used. The fund is meant to take the first risk so that companies put more of their own money in afterwards.

The pause is a processing decision. The scheme has not been withdrawn. A scheme that stops taking forms because it cannot read the forms it has is a different failure from a scheme that has no applicants. Pathak's account is the second kind of problem. Four hundred files are in the building. The committee has to price them before it can offer terms. Letters of intent, the formal offer that comes before a loan, wait on that work.

Earlier reporting on the same fund, from late September, said the Department of Science and Technology had an allocation of 23,000 crore rupees against the 1 lakh crore headline, that more than 300 firms had applied, that about 100 had been appraised, and that 35 had been selected. Firms named in that round included Agnikul Cosmos, GalaxEye, QuNu Labs, ideaForge and EndureAir. A second batch of 13 had been finalised in August without letters of intent, on that account, because the money for fresh offers had not arrived. Pathak's Tuesday figure of about 400 under scrutiny is larger than the September application count, which fits a call that stayed open and then shut under the weight.

The structure matters for anyone waiting on a cheque. The fund sits with the Anusandhan National Research Foundation, set up under the 2023 Act, and the Technology Development Board is the agency selecting beneficiaries. Money that is allocated in a budget is not money that has reached a company. The gap between the two is where the August letters stalled, and it is the gap Pathak did not close on Tuesday. He said the call would reopen after screening. He did not give a date.

For the firms already in, the wait is the cost. A deep-tech company that applied for a long-term loan cannot hire against a file that is still in committee. A firm that has a letter can. The 35 selected and the 13 waiting on letters are in different positions from the hundreds still being read. Tuesday's news sorts the queue. It does not pay it.

The number to watch is not the 1 lakh crore on the letterhead. It is how many of the 400 files become letters, and whether the call reopens with money behind it. Pathak said the board has enough proposals in hand. The applicants will find out, file by file, whether that is true.

The 0.8 percent figure Pathak used is a share of revenue, not the usual share of GDP that research statistics quote. The two are not interchangeable. A firm that spends 0.8 percent of revenue on research is describing a company account. A country that spends under 1 percent of GDP is describing a national account. Pathak's point was the company side: private firms are a minority of the spend, and the fund is built to change that by taking the early loss. Whether 400 files can do that depends on how many become loans, not on how many arrived.

Applicants who missed the pause have a wait of unknown length. Pathak said the call would reopen after the screening. He did not say the terms would be the same, or that the allocation would have reached the board by then. The file a founder sends next month may meet a different cheque book from the file a founder sent in September. That is the risk of a scheme that stops the door while it reads the pile.