We will operationalise the Anusandhan National Research Foundation to build robust Research and Development infrastructure across the country… We will set up an Anusandhan Fund with an investment of ₹1 lakh crore to provide loans to promote scientific research.

The 2024 manifesto makes two research commitments in adjacent paragraphs. The first is institutional: "We will operationalise the Anusandhan National Research Foundation to build robust Research and Development infrastructure across the country." The second is financial: "We will set up an Anusandhan Fund with an investment of ₹1 lakh crore to provide loans to promote scientific research."

On the first, the government's answer is direct. The Ministry of Science and Technology told the Lok Sabha on 25 March 2026: "The Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) has been operationalized." The sequence it gives is verifiable — the ANRF Act received assent on 12 August 2023, was notified on 14 August 2023 and came into force on 5 February 2024; the Governing Board, chaired by the Prime Minister, first met in September 2024.

Programmes are running: the Prime Minister's Early Career Research Grant, an Advance Research Grant, an Inclusivity Research Grant, and Partnerships for Accelerated Innovation and Research, plus mission-mode work under the Mission for Advancement in High-Impact Areas covering electric mobility, artificial intelligence, MedTech and critical raw materials. Consortium projects with industry co-funding have begun — the electric vehicle mission is the example the ministry names.

The gap is in what has actually been spent. The answer publishes the 2025-26 figures for the ANRF budget head: a budget estimate of ₹2,000 crore, a revised estimate of ₹1,948 crore, ₹1,506 crore received and ₹961.35 crore assigned as on 23 March 2026 — a week before the financial year closed. Slightly under half of what was budgeted was assigned in the year, and about two-thirds of what was received. For a body whose whole purpose is to move money into research at scale, that is the number to watch, and the answer gives no reason for the gap.

On the ₹1 lakh crore Anusandhan Fund, this answer says nothing. That corpus, announced as a fifty-year interest-free loan facility in the 2024-25 interim budget, is administered separately from the ANRF budget head reported here, and we hold no primary document tracking its disbursement. Rather than restate figures we cannot source, we record it as untested.

The term runs to 2029, so this is an interim reading. The foundation was promised and it was operationalised — that half of the promise is kept. The funding behind it is running at under half of budget, and the larger ₹1 lakh crore commitment is not yet visible in any document we hold. Our verdict is partly accurate.