India, March 29 -- In 1986, China launched its Twelve-Year Science and Technology Development Plan. Two years later, India formalised its Scientific Policy Resolution, drafted under Jawaharlal Nehru's direct supervision. Both documents were ambitious. Both reflected a post-independence hunger for modernity. Both identified science as the engine of rational transformation. Seventy years on, the two countries have arrived at rather different destinations.

India spends $27 billion on R&D annually (2023 estimate). China spends $533 billion. Huawei alone spent $24 billion on R&D in 2024. But the gap in quantum is, in some ways, the least interesting part of the story.

The numbers reveal something more troubling than the headline figure. Indi...