With its billion plus population and huge scientific manpower, India is all set to emerge as a global research and development hub soon.

Speaking at the 38th annual convocation of the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade; RA Mashelkar, Director-General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and Secretary, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, said more than 100 companies from across the globe had set up their research centres in India in the past five years.

Among these, the biggest would be the GE's centre at Bangalore. Its staff strength will soon increase to around 2,400, from the present 1,600, making it the second largest research and development centre of the company in the world.

"Several leading enterprises around the world are eager to build innovation platforms through multi-sourcing of innovations. The trend is also being fuelled by the shortage of research and development personnel. Companies, therefore, have to bridge the demand-supply gap in skills by outsourcing, obtaining high-quality engineers, scientists and designers," Mashelkar said.

He also added that innovations were starting to have multiple geographical and organisational sources of technology, with increasingly differentiated and innovation specific patterns of diffusion.

Research and development in high technology industries — like biotechnology, microelectronics, pharmaceuticals, information technology and new materials — have become highly technical.

Elaborating on India's research and development potential, he emphasised that the country had over 250 universities, 1,500 research and development units, engineering colleges and the world's largest chains of publicly funded research and development institutions, all of which remained under-utilised.

Citing the example of the National Chemical Laboratory, where the process of globalisation of research and development began in 1989, he said the laboratory recognised that the competitive advantage in high-technology business would depend increasingly on underlying technical skills of the organisation rather than on particular products.