3 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Jul 31, 2026 05:07 AM IST
The committee responsible for selecting companies for receiving money from the newly-created Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) fund had picked at least 15 companies in which members of the committee themselves had a personal stake, according to information provided by the government in Parliament on Thursday.
In a written answer in the Rajya Sabha, Science and Technology Minister Jitendra Singh provided a list of seven members of the committee who had personal stakes in these 15 companies that have been among those chosen for receiving money from the RDI Fund. The RDI Fund is a Rs 1 lakh crore corpus created by the Centre last year to promote research and development activities and innovation in the private sector, particularly in high-priority areas like deep-tech. The fund is meant to provide long-term low-cost financing to the private sector. The funds are channelised through what are known as second-level fund managers (SLFMs).
These are a few selected organisations which have been empowered to invest in private sector companies in the form of equity, debt or both, using money from the RDI Fund. Current SLFMs include Technology Development Board under the Department of Science and Technology, and Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council under the Department of Biotechnology. Every SLFM is supposed to have an investment committee for assessing and vetting investment proposals from the private sector companies seeking funding from the RDI Fund.
In response to a question by Rajya Sabha member Praveen Chakravarthy, Singh gave names of seven members of the Investment Committee of the Technology Development Board who had made investments in at least 15 entities selected for receiving money from the RDI Fund. Singh said that the TDB had a conflict-of-interest policy for members of the investment committee, but did not specify what this policy was, or whether the selection of these companies constituted a violation of the policy. The implementation guidelines for the RDI scheme say that the investment panel “must be constituted in a way that avoids potential conflicts of interest”.
It added that the SLFM must take care to ensure that there was no conflict of interest in the choice of specific projects for financing, “given the likelihood of domain experts on its IC (investment committee) being investors in ideas and companies”. It is also not clear if any of the members of the investment panel named in Singh’s response in the Rajya Sabha participated in the decision-making process that led to the selection of the company in which they had investments, or they recused themselves in any manner.