What an Indian think tank is for, and why so few do it well

The phrase "think tank" gets applied loosely in Indian public discourse to a remarkably wide range of institutions: government-adjacent bodies such as NITI Aayog, which is formally an arm of the Union government and cannot by any reasonable definition claim independence from it; university-affiliated research centres with genuine scholarly rigour but limited engagement with active policymaking; donor-funded advocacy organisations whose research, however competent, is produced in service of a predetermined position; and a handful of institutions, such as the Centre for Policy Research in its long pre-2023 history, the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, or the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, that have attempted the harder synthesis of independent research and sustained policy relevance. Conflating these categories does a disservice to understanding what a functioning policy research ecosystem actually requires.

A think tank, properly understood, exists to do something markets and governments both struggle to do on their own: produce rigorous, reasonably disinterested analysis of a policy question, published with enough independence that its conclusions retain credibility even when they are inconvenient to the institution's funders or to the government of the day. Judged against that standard, India's ecosystem remains thin, and the reasons are structural rather than a simple shortage of talent.

The funding trap

Nearly every model of think tank funding available in India carries a distortion. Government funding, whether direct grants or consultancy contracts, creates an obvious incentive to avoid conclusions the funding ministry will find unwelcome, and Indian bureaucracies have shown themselves willing to quietly discontinue funding relationships with institutions whose findings become inconvenient. Corporate and industry-association funding, common for think tanks working on trade, taxation or sectoral regulation, creates the mirror problem: research questions and conclusions that happen to align with the interests of the sector paying for them, even when no explicit instruction to that effect is ever given, because researchers reasonably anticipate what kind of findings will secure the next funding cycle. International foundation funding, a major source for organisations working on governance, rights and development, has increasingly become entangled in India's regulatory approach to foreign contributions, with the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act's amendments in recent years making compliance considerably harder and giving the government significant discretionary power to restrict or revoke an organisation's ability to receive funds it depends on.

The 2022 revocation, and subsequent partial restoration under legal challenge, of the Centre for Policy Research's FCRA registration, following an income tax survey of its premises, is the starkest recent illustration of how this discretionary power can be exercised against an institution whose research had, over a long history, produced findings uncomfortable to governments of multiple parties. Whether or not the specific tax and regulatory concerns cited were themselves ultimately justified, the sequence demonstrated to the entire sector how much an institution's operational survival can depend on regulatory goodwill rather than on the quality of its research alone, a lesson every serious institution in the space has since had to absorb.

The relevance problem, in the other direction

It would be equally wrong to romanticise total independence as the answer, since a think tank with impeccable independence but no channel into actual policymaking is producing scholarship, which is valuable, but not fulfilling the specific function a think tank is meant to serve. NITI Aayog, whatever its independence limitations as a government body, has in practice been one of the more consequential venues for translating research-adjacent analysis into policy movement, precisely because it sits inside government and can shepherd ideas through the bureaucratic process that an external institution, however rigorous, often cannot navigate alone. The trade-off between independence and access to the policy process is real, and different institutions in India have made different, defensible choices about where to sit on that spectrum.

What the better institutions get right

The Indian institutions that have sustained credibility over long periods share a few common features. They diversify funding sources deliberately, so that no single government contract, corporate donor or foreign foundation can single-handedly determine their survival or shape their research agenda. They publish underlying data and methodology alongside conclusions, inviting scrutiny rather than presenting findings as settled expertise, a practice that organisations such as NIPFP have maintained consistently in their fiscal and public finance work. And they maintain enough internal diversity of view — researchers who disagree with each other publicly, rather than a single institutional line — that outside observers can distinguish genuine analytical disagreement from institutional messaging.

The public accessibility gap

A further, underappreciated weakness of the Indian think tank ecosystem is its limited translation of research into a form ordinary citizens, rather than fellow specialists and bureaucrats, can actually use. Much high-quality Indian policy research remains confined to working papers and seminar circuits legible mainly to an audience that already has policy expertise, while the public debate on the same questions proceeds largely uninformed by that research, filled instead by television panel assertion. A small number of organisations, including some data journalism initiatives that draw directly on think tank research, have begun to close this gap, but it remains one of the more significant missed opportunities in Indian public discourse: rigorous research exists on many contested policy questions, but it rarely reaches the audience whose votes and civic engagement the debate is ostensibly about.

The case for taking the ecosystem seriously

A democracy the size and complexity of India's needs institutions capable of producing evidence-based analysis at arm's length from both government and commercial interest, and capable of communicating that analysis to a public wider than Delhi's policy circuit. The events surrounding CPR should worry anyone who values that function, regardless of their view on the specific regulatory questions involved, because an ecosystem where institutional survival depends on avoiding inconvenient conclusions cannot, over time, produce the kind of research a democracy actually needs to hold its own government accountable. Building a more resilient version of that ecosystem will require diversified funding, statutory protections that make regulatory retaliation harder to exercise arbitrarily, and a sustained commitment from the institutions themselves to writing for citizens, not only for each other.