Mishik Sharma

I. From Political Independence to Institutional Capability India enters its 80th year of Independence with an ambition that would have seemed extraordinary in 1947: to become a developed nation by 2047. The vision of Viksit Bharat is not simply an aspiration for a larger economy. It implies the development of capabilities across manufacturing, agriculture and food processing, technology and innovation, infrastructure, defence, energy and the green and blue economies. In their Independence Day addresses, President Droupadi Murmu (in the I-Day eve address) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi placed considerable emphasis on the people and institutions that must carry this transformation forward — students, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, workers, and public institutions. Yet ambitious development requires not only productive capabilities, but also institutions capable of governing the increasingly complex economy that those capabilities will create. This brings regulation into an impor...

1. Introduction: A Bioeconomy Without a Middle India's interest in the bioeconomy is entering a new phase. For many years, biotechnology policy was associated primarily with pharmaceuticals, vaccines, agricultural biotechnology, and research institutions. The country's growing capabilities in biopharmaceuticals have since pushed the frontier further, while newer policy initiatives are beginning to emphasise bio-manufacturing as an industrial opportunity in its own right. At the same time, businesses are increasingly exploring a much wider range of biological applications — from industrial fermentation and specialty ingredients to bioplastics, biomaterials, nutraceuticals, and other bio-based products. These developments are important not only because they create new industries, but because they suggest that biological resources could become a more significant part of India's manufacturing economy. Agricultural crops, forestry resources, biological residues and other forms o...