Indian inventions

This list of Indian inventions and discoveries details the inventions, scientific discoveries and contributions of India, including the ancient, classical and post-classical nations in the subcontinent historically referred to as India and the modern Indian state. It draws from the whole cultural and technological history of India, during which architecture, astronomy, cartography, metallurgy, logic, mathematics, metrology and mineralogy were among the branches of study pursued by its scholars. During recent times science and technology in the Republic of India has also focused on automobile engineering, information technology, communications as well as research into space and polar technology.

For the purpose of this list, the inventions are regarded as technological firsts developed in India, and as such does not include foreign technologies which India acquired through contact. It also does not include technologies or discoveries developed elsewhere and later invented separately in India, nor inventions by Indian emigres in other places. Changes in minor concepts of design or style and artistic innovations do not appear in the lists.

Inventions

Administration

* Janapada (democratic republic system) (1100-500 BCE)
* Local government: presence of municipality in Indus Valley Civilization is characterised by rubbish bins and drainage system throughout urban areas. Megasthenes also mentions presence of a local government in the Mauryan city of Pataliputra.
* Passport: Arthashastra () make mentions of passes issued at the rate of one '' masha'' per pass to enter and exit the country. Chapter 34 of the Second Book of Arthashastra concerns with the duties of the () who must issue sealed passes before a person could enter or leave the countryside. This constitutes first passports and passbooks in world history

Communication

* Crystal detector by Jagadish Chandra Bose. Crystals were first used as radio wave detectors in 1894 by Bose in his microwave experiments. Bose first patented a crystal detector in 1901.
* Horn antenna or microwave horn, One of the first horn antennas was constructed by Jagadish Chandra Bose in 1897. reprinted in Igor Grigorov, Ed.,
Antentop
', Vol.2, No.3, p.87-96, Belgorod, Russia
* Microwave Communication: The first public demonstration of microwave transmission was made by Jagadish Chandra Bose, in Calcutta, in 1895, two years before a similar demonstration by Marconi in England, and just a year after Oliver Lodge's commemorative lecture on Radio communication, following Hertz's death. Bose's revolutionary demonstration forms the foundation of the technology used in mobile telephony, radars, satellite communication, radios, television broadcast, WiFi, remote controls and countless other applications.

Computers and programming languages

*J Sharp: Visual J# programming language was a transitional language for programmers of Java and Visual J++ languages, so they could use their existing knowledge and applications on .NET Framework. It was developed by the Hyderabad-based Microsoft India Development Center at HITEC City in India.
*Julia is a high-level, dynamic programming language. Its features are well suited for numerical analysis and computational science. Viral B. Shah an Indian computer scientist contributed to the development of the language in Bangalore while also actively involved in the initial design of the Aadhaar project in India using India Stack.
* Kojo: Kojo is a programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) for computer programming and learning. Kojo is an open-source software. It was created, and is actively developed, by Lalit Pant, a computer programmer and teacher living in Dehradun, India.
* RISC-V ISA (microprocessor) implementations:
** SHAKTI - Open Source, Bluespec System Verilog definitions, for FinFET implementations of the ISA, have been created at IIT Madras, and are hosted on GitLab.
** VEGA Microprocessors: India's first indigenous 64-bit, superscalar, out-of-order, multi-core RISC-V Processor design, developed by C-DAC.

Construction, civil engineering and architecture

* BharatNet(National Optical Fibre Network) is establishment, management, and operation of the National Optical Fibre Network as an Infrastructure to provide a minimum of 100 Mbit/s broadband connectivity to all rural and remote areas. BBNL was established in 2012 to lay the optical fiber.
*English Bond: The English bond is a form of brickwork with alternating stretching and heading courses, with the headers centred over the midpoint of the stretchers, and perpends in each alternate course aligned. Harappan architecture in South Asia was the first to use the so-called English bond in building with bricks.

* Dedicated Freight Corridors is an electric high speed and high capacity railway corridor that is exclusively meant for the transportation of double stack freight cargo.It will help in freeing up the passenger corridor.
*Dockyard: The world's earliest enclosed dockyard was built in the Harappan port city of Lothal circa 2600 BC in Gujarat, India. *Genome Valley is world's first organized cluster for Life Sciences R&D and Clean Manufacturing activities, with world-class infrastructure facilities in the form of Industrial / Knowledge Parks, Special Economic Zones (SEZs), Multi-tenanted dry and wet laboratories and incubation facilities.
* Light Gauge Steel framing is a construction technology using cold-formed steel as the construction material. It can be used for roof systems, floor systems, wall systems, roof panels, decks, or the entire buildings.
* Multi-Modal Logistics Parks (MMLPs) defined as a freight-handling facility with a minimum area of 100 acres (40.5 hectares), with various modes of transport access, mechanized warehouses, specialized storage solutions such as cold storage, facilities for mechanized material handling and inter-modal transfer container terminals, and bulk and break-bulk cargo terminals.
* Plumbing: Standardized earthen plumbing pipes with broad flanges making use of asphalt for preventing leakages appeared in the urban settlements of the Indus Valley Civilization by 2700 BC. Earthen pipes were used in the Indus Valley c. 2700 BC for a city-scale urban drainage system,
* Plastic road are made entirely of plastic or of composites of plastic with other materials. Plastic roads are different from standard roads in the respect that standard roads are made from asphalt concrete, which consists of mineral aggregates and asphalt. Most plastic roads sequester plastic waste within the asphalt as an aggregate. Plastic roads first developed by Rajagopalan Vasudevan in 2001
* Chenab Bridge is world's highest rail bridge and world's first blast-proof steel bridge.The bridge is built using 63mm-thick special blast-proof steel.
* Squat toilet: Toilet platforms above drains, in the proximity of wells, are found in several houses of the cities of Mohenjodaro from the 3rd millennium BCE.
* Soil Health Card under the scheme, the government plans to issue soil cards to farmers which will carry crop-wise recommendations of nutrients and fertilisers required for the individual farms to help farmers to improve productivity through judicious use of inputs. All soil samples are to be tested in various soil testing labs across the country.
* Stepwell: Earliest clear evidence of the origins of the stepwell is found in the Indus Valley Civilisation's archaeological site at Mohenjodaro in India. The three features of stepwells in the subcontinent are evident from one particular site, abandoned by 2500 BCE, which combines a bathing pool, steps leading down to water, and figures of some religious importance into one structure. The early centuries immediately before the common era saw the Buddhists and the Jains of India adapt the stepwells into their architecture. Both the wells and the form of ritual bathing reached other parts of the world with Buddhism. Rock-cut step wells in the subcontinent date from 200 to 400 CE. Subsequently, the wells at Dhank (550625 CE) and stepped ponds at Bhinmal (850950 CE) were constructed.Livingston & Beach, page xxiii
* Stupa: The origin of the stupa can be traced to 3rd-century BCE India.Encyclopædia Britannica (2008). ''Pagoda''. It was used as a commemorative monument associated with storing sacred relics. The stupa architecture was adopted in Southeast and East Asia, where it evolved into the pagoda, a Buddhist monument used for enshrining sacred relics.

Finance and banking

* Cheque: There is early evidence of using cheques. In India, during the Maurya Empire (from 321 to 185 BC), a commercial instrument called the adesha was in use, which was an order on a banker desiring him to pay the money of the note to a third person.
* Direct Benefit Transfer, This program aims to transfer subsidies directly to the people through their bank accounts. It is hoped that crediting subsidies into bank accounts will reduce leakages, delays, etc.
* Digital Banking Unit(DBU) is a specialised fixed point business unit/hub housing certain minimum digital infrastructure for delivering digital banking products and services as well as servicing existing financial products & services digitally, in both self-service and assisted mode.
* Payments bank is an Indian new model of banks conceptualised by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) without issuing credit.
* Small Finance Bank are a type of niche banks in India. Banks with a small finance bank (SFB) license can provide basic banking service of acceptance of deposits and lending. The aim behind these is to provide financial inclusion to sections of the economy not being served by other banks,
* Micro Finance Institutions(MFI) is an organization that offers financial services to low income populations.

Games

* Badminton: The game may have originally developed among expatriate officers in British India
*Blindfold Chess: Games prohibited by Buddha includes a variant of ashtapada game played on imaginary boards. ''Akasam astapadam'' was an ''ashtapada'' variant played with no board, literally "astapadam played in the sky". A correspondent in the American Chess Bulletin identifies this as likely the earliest literary mention of a blindfold chess variant.
*Carrom: The game of carrom originated in India. One carrom board with its surface made of glass is still available in one of the palaces in Patiala, India. It became very popular among the masses after World War I. State-level competitions were being held in the different states of India during the early part of the twentieth century. Serious carrom tournaments may have begun in Sri Lanka in 1935 but by 1958, both India and Sri Lanka had formed official federations of carrom clubs, sponsoring tournaments and awarding prizes.
* Chaturanga: The precursor of chess originated in India during the Gupta dynasty (c. 280550 CE).Murray (1913)Forbes (1860)Jones, William (1807). "On the Indian Game of Chess". pages 323333Linde, Antonius (1981) Both the Persians and Arabs ascribe the origins of the game of Chess to the Indians.Wilkinson, Charles K (May 1943)Bird (1893), page 63 The words for "chess" in Old Persian and Arabic are ''chatrang'' and ''shatranj'' respectively – terms derived from '' caturaṅga'' in Sanskrit,Hooper & Whyld (1992), page 74Sapra, Rahul (2000). "Sports in India". Students' Britannica India (Vol. 6). Mumbai: Popular Prakashan. p. 106. . which literally means an ''army of four divisions'' or ''four corps''.Meri (2005), page 148Basham (2001), page 208 Chess spread throughout the world and many variants of the game soon began taking shape.Encyclopædia Britannica (2002). ''Chess: Ancient precursors and related games''. This game was introduced to the Near East from India and became a part of the princely or courtly education of Persian nobility. Buddhist pilgrims, Silk Road traders and others carried it to the Far East where it was transformed and assimilated into a game often played on the intersection of the lines of the board rather than within the squares. Chaturanga reached Europe through Persia, the Byzantine empire and the expanding Arabian empire.Encyclopædia Britannica (2007). ''Chess: Introduction to Europe''. Muslims carried Shatranj to North Africa, Sicily, and Spain by the 10th century where it took its final modern form of chess.
* Kabaddi: The game of ''kabaddi'' originated in India during prehistory.Alter, page 88 Suggestions on how it evolved into the modern form range from wrestling exercises, military drills, and collective self-defence but most authorities agree that the game existed in some form or the other in India during the period between 1500 and 400 BCE.
*Kalaripayattu: One of the world's oldest form of martial arts is Kalaripayattu that developed in the southwest state of Kerala in India. It is believed to be the oldest surviving martial art in India, with a history spanning over 3,000 years.
* Ludo: Pachisi originated in India by the 6th century.MSN Encarta (2008)
''Pachisi''
The earliest evidence of this game in India is the depiction of boards on the caves of Ajanta. A variant of this game, called Ludo, made its way to England during the British Raj.
* Mallakhamba: It is a traditional sport, originating from the Indian subcontinent, in which a gymnast performs aerial yoga or gymnastic postures and wrestling grips in concert with a vertical stationary or hanging wooden pole, cane, or rope.The earliest literary known mention of Mallakhamb is in the 1135 CE Sanskrit classic '' Manasollasa'', written by Someshvara III. It has been thought to be the ancestor of Pole Dancing.
* Nuntaa, also known as Kutkute.
* Seven Stones: An Indian subcontinent game also called Pitthu is played in rural areas has its origins in the Indus Valley Civilization.
* Snakes and ladders: Vaikunta pali Snakes and ladders originated in India as a game based on morality.Augustyn, pages 2728 During British rule of India, this game made its way to England, and was eventually introduced in the United States of America by game-pioneer Milton Bradley in 1943.
* Suits game: Kridapatram is an early suits game, made of painted rags, invented in Ancient India. The term ''kridapatram'' literally means "painted rags for playing." Paper playing cards first appeared in East Asia during the 9th century. The medieval Indian game of ''ganjifa'', or playing cards, is first recorded in the 16th century.
* Table Tennis: It has been suggested that makeshift versions of the game were developed by British military officers in India around the 1860s or 1870s, who brought it back with them.
* Vajra-mushti: refers to a wrestling where knuckleduster like weapon is employed.The first literary mention of vajra-musti comes from the ''Manasollasa'' of the Chalukya king Someswara III (1124–1138), although it has been conjectured to have existed since as early as the Maurya dynasty

Genetics

* Amrapali mango is a named mango cultivar introduced in 1971 by Dr. Pijush Kanti Majumdar at the Indian Agriculture Research Institute in Delhi.
* Synthetic genes and decoding of protein synthesising gene: Indian-American biochemist Har Gobind Khorona, created the first synthetic gene and uncovered how a DNA's genetic code determines protein synthesis – which dictates how a cell functions. That discovery earned Khorana, along with his two colleagues, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968.
*''Pseudomonas putida'': Indian (Bengali) inventor and microbiologist Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty created a variety of man-made microorganism to break down crude oil. He genetically engineered a new variety of ''Pseudomonas'' bacteria ("the oil-eating bacteria") in 1971. In ''Diamond v. Chakrabarty'', the United States Supreme Court granted Chakrabarty's invention patent, even though it was a living organism. The court ruling decreed that Chakrabarty's discovery was "not nature's handiwork, but his own..." Chakrabarty secured his patent in 1980.
* Mynvax is world's first "warm" COVID-19 vaccine, developed by IISc, capable of withstanding 37C for a month and neutralise all coronavirus variants of concern.
* ZyCoV-D vaccine, World's First DNA Based Covid-19 Vaccine.

Metallurgy and manufacturing

* 2G-Ethanol technology, which produces ethanol from agricultural residue feedstock, has the potential to significantly reduce emissions from the transportation and agricultural sectors in India.The IP belongs to Praj Industries.
* High ash coal gasification(Coal to Methanol), The Central Government gave the country world's first 'coal to methanol' (CTM) plant built by the Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL). The plant was inaugurated in BHEL's Hyderabad unit, The pilot project is the first that uses the gasification method for converting high-ash coal into methanol. Handling of high ash and heat required to melt this high amount of ash is a challenge in the case of Indian coal, which generally has high ash content. Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited has developed the fluidized bed gasification technology suitable for high ash Indian coals to produce syngas and then convert syngas to methanol with 99% purity.
* CBM in Blast Furnace, Tata Steel has initiated the trial for continuous injection of Coal Bed Methane (CBM) gas in one of the Blast Furnaces at its Jamshedpur Works, making it the first such instance in the world where a steel company has used CBM as injectant. This process is expected to reduce coke rate by 10 kg/thm, which will be equivalent to reducing 33 kg of per tonne of crude steel.
* Crucible steel: Perhaps as early as 300 BCE—although certainly by 200 BCE—high quality steel was being produced in southern India, by what Europeans would later call the crucible technique. In this system, high-purity wrought iron, charcoal, and glass were mixed in a crucible and heated until the iron melted and absorbed the carbon.
* Diamond drills: in the 12th century BCE or 7th century BCE, Indians not only innovated use of diamond tipped drills but also invented double diamond tipped drills for bead manufacturing.
* Diamond cutting and polishing: The technology of cutting and polishing diamonds was invented in India, Ratnapariksha, a text dated to 6th century talks about diamond cutting and Al-Beruni speaks about the method of using lead plate for diamond polishing in the 11th century CE.
* DMR grade steels for several high-technology applications, such as military hardware and aerospace, need to possess ultrahigh strength (UHS; minimum yield strength of 1380 MPa (200 ksi)) coupled with high fracture toughness in order to meet the requirement of minimum weight while ensuring high reliability.
* Etched Carnelian beads: are a type of ancient decorative beads made from carnelian with an etched design in white. They were made according to a technique of alkaline-etching developed by the Harappans during the 3rd millennium BCE and were widely disperced from China in the east to Greece in the west.
* Fortified Cabin, is a car designing technique by TATA Motors such that the high-strength steel structure absorbs impact energy and protects the passenger during an unfortunate collision.Tata Nexon has the fortified cabin design for achieving full 5 star safety ratings.
* Glass blowing: Rudimentary form of glass blowing from Indian subcontinent is attested earlier than Western Asian counterparts(where it is attested not earlier than 1st century BCE) in the form of Indo-Pacific beads which uses glass blowing to make cavity before being subjected to tube drawn technique for bead making dated more than 2500 BP. Beads are made by attaching molten glass gather to the end of a blowpipe, a bubble is then blown into the gather. The glass blown vessels were rarely attested and were imported commodity in 1st millennium CE though.
* Iron pillar of Delhi: The world's first iron pillar was the Iron pillar of Delhi—erected at the time of Chandragupta II Vikramaditya (375413). The pillar has attracted attention of archaeologists and materials scientists and has been called "a testament to the skill of ancient Indian blacksmiths" because of its high resistance to corrosion.
* Lost-wax casting: Metal casting by the Indus Valley civilization began around 3500 BC in the Mohenjodaro