The clusters anchoring India’s innovation and manufacturing base today have taken shape through decades of ambitious policy from central and state governments, the case India built to draw in global majors and their capital, the Indian companies who grew with these clusters and became central to them, and the incubation layers feeding the next generation of companies into that capacity. Our role across two decades of that are has spanned Genome Valley at Hyderabad, among Asia’s leading science clusters today; BLR District at Bengaluru; and Medpolis at AMTZ, Visakhapatnam — and the record across the three reflects not one template applied universally, but three distinct strategic postures – each read against a different starting condition.
Our journey at Genome Valley began with an early role in state policy, contributing to what became India’s first State Biotechnology Policy. But for a government partner, what has mattered more over two decades is what came after — staying on as a development partner, continuing to build for science.
Some of that build was straightforward capacity: research and scale-up infrastructure. But capacity alone does not make a cluster. The more consequential judgment was identifying the gap sitting just past research — the point where a discovery has to move from bench scale to pilot scale before it can reach commercial production. That step is capital-intensive in a way most young Indian science companies aren’t built to absorb alone. Earlier in the cluster’s life, that meant powering the city’s leading life science incubator. More recently, it has meant standing up India’s first PPP bio-accelerator, giving companies the bioprocess scale-up capability to move from research into production without leaving the ecosystem they started in.
Equally intentional was the work of building relationships: bringing global biopharma and pharma-services majors into an emerging cluster, and building the case for early-stage Indian pharma and biotech companies to grow into leaders in their own right. What that mix creates, in practice, is a working relationship between established and emerging companies inside the same cluster — global and Indian players who can become each other’s customers, collaborators, and mentors.
None of this compounds without the connective layer on top of it — the GRID, a wireframe developed at Genome Valley for how a science cluster holds together, built around two interconnected verticals: innovation and manufacturing. Networking forums, industry-academia platforms, and collaborative R&D spaces sit physically linked to housing, hospitality, healthcare, and a shared campus commons. At Genome Valley it connects an accelerator, collaborative R&D buildings, a CRO centre, healthcare, hospitality, and residency within walking distance of each other, each node built to depend on the others rather than merely sit beside them — the layer that decides whether a scientist’s family can build a life around the work. It is now the underlying wireframe being applied, in adapted form, across the other two clusters as well.
The results speak for themselves in what Genome Valley has become: over 250 companies, among Asia’s leading science clusters today, spanning preclinical research, biologics and vaccine manufacturing, pharmaceutical R&D, and testing and analytical services — a roster of global biopharma and pharmaservices majors and leading Indian pharma and biotech.
Bengaluru presented a different strategic opportunity, and the first real test of the GRID beyond Genome Valley. The city already had incubators and fragmented lab space, but no unified architecture for taking a discovery through to manufacturing, and no destination built for India’s new age of innovation across science sectors — a role Bengaluru was already positioned for, and one BLR District was built to usher in. Where Genome Valley’s coherence accumulated across two decades of sequential decisions, BLR District was designed to hold that coherence from the outset, around a single constraint: that a molecule’s path from discovery to market shouldn’t mean a company has to leave the campus. Companies occupy distinct positions along that path rather than interchangeable lab suites, spanning cell and gene therapy and GMP manufacturing through to formulation, chemistry, fermentation, and oncology research. That sequencing pays off in a way that’s easy to underrate: a company that needs its next capability doesn’t have to go find and vet an unfamiliar partner elsewhere — it’s already next door, already known, already trusted enough to work with directly.
Visakhapatnam presented a third condition, and the most distinct of the three: a cluster that already existed. AMTZ had established the city as a medtech manufacturing base. Medpolis extends the GRID onto that existing base rather than building it from the ground up — compounding the cluster’s capability to host more research and advanced manufacturing, deepening early-stage incubation and building out a faster path from prototype to certified production, on top of the existing manufacturing strength rather than in place of it. A 20- acre footprint and a plan for more than a million sq. ft. of new environments represent that addition, sized to carry a cluster into its next decade rather than seed its first.
What connects the three is the GRID itself — one wireframe, read against three different starting conditions rather than reinvented as three separate methods. In every case it has demanded the willingness to remain engaged through the parts of building a cluster that do not show up on a balance sheet: incubation phases that generate no meaningful revenue, infrastructure regulators mandate but companies do not pay a premium for, the years it takes a policy conversation or an underused cluster to become a functioning one. Across the three clusters, over 2.5 million sq. ft. of environments have been activated to date, with a clear trajectory toward 5 million sq. ft. activated by 2032. Other emerging clusters already sit on the pipeline map, and each will likely call for its own version of what Hyderabad, Bengaluru, or Visakhapatnam envisioned.
Two decades of this work add up to less a formula than a discipline: reading what a given cluster is actually missing — often the quiet middle step, the pilot line, the accelerator, the housing block, the hospitality node — and holding that gap until it closes. That’s one question, read three different ways depending on who’s asking. For a science enterprise, it’s about the infrastructure and support already in place to build on. For an investor, it’s about where the retention economics actually come from — genuine cluster density, built by taking an active role in shaping the science and manufacturing capability a region will need for decades. For a government, it’s about which partner has stayed through every quiet phase of the last two decades, and intends to stay through the next.