Narayan Murthy recently lamented before an audience at Indian Institute of Science, Bamgalore  that India has failed to produce a breakthrough innovation in the last 60 years. There are several reasons for this. Innovative ideas do require the government support. A product such as Simputer, a simple computer for rural India was not encouraged by government funding or government buying. It was pioneered by Swami Manohar and his associates. It incorporated accelerometer that enables you to flick the device and move pages, zoom or invert the screen. It had handwriting email capability. It was net-linked. All these features were later adopted for smartphones. Indian researchers are averse to working on long gestation period projects, as the risk is more. In India, industry and other rich people do not come forward for philanthropic funding. Science college professors do not commercialise their ideas. India lacks academic entrepreneurship. India’s research was primarily aimned at import substitution. We focused on frugal engineering and affordable technology. This prempts good returns. Cipla did a great job in providing anti-AIDS drugs to Africans at affordable prices. Pharma here produced generics of patented molecules by tweaking a process. India could succeed in producing cheap generics. Big pharma companies in the world spend billions of dollars in R&D. Our top 25 pharma companies together spend just $ 1 billion a year on R&D. VCs are not ready to wait for a decade for an idea to succeed. They want projects to succeed quickly, with shorter lead times, e.g. IT industry. Indian academic institutions have not given weightage to research, and have rather used publishing in the journals as the criterion for promotion. India after independence has not a single Nobel laureate or Wolf Prize winner or a Millennium Technology Prize awardee. Our scientists do not become fellows of the Royal Society or Associates of National Academy of  Sciences, US.