5 min readAug 1, 2026 07:07 AM IST First published on: Aug 1, 2026 at 07:07 AM ISTAchieving Viksit Bharat requires India to sustain economic advancement and retain strategic autonomy. Both converge in high technology, where prime human capital can build frontier enterprises. A decade of tenacious policy reform under the Modi government has brought the deep-tech ecosystem — space tech, biotechnology, semiconductors, robotics — to critical mass. Loss-making companies have a listing path, but the genuinely excluded class is the intellectual property-driven pre-commercial business — a molecule in clinical trials, a chip awaiting tape-out, an electric aircraft in development — where capital precedes scaled revenue by years.India’s strategic competitor has seen and addressed this issue. In 2018, as American sanctions tightened, China created the STAR Market — opened in Shanghai in 2019 as a disclosure-gated deep-tech board. Seven years on, 592 companies have raised about $160 billion. The aperture keeps widening — AI, robotics, space — and the verdict is in: The STAR 50 index rose 64 per cent in the first half of 2026, and Cambricon, a chip designer that listed unprofitable in 2020, became the board’s first trillion-renminbi company. China has built capital markets as an instrument of growth and strategic competition. India denies founders of comparable talent domestic listing avenues.AdvertisementIndia should adopt two propositions as core policy. First, the country should have a third exchange — large markets sustain multiple venues, as America’s NYSE–AMEX–NASDAQ trifecta showed. The Calcutta Stock Exchange (CSE), whose revival the West Bengal government’s 2026–27 budget backs, is the natural candidate. The storied CSE was established in 1908, months after 8,000 Indian households financed Tata Steel by public subscription — the deep technology of its age, backed pre-revenue with Indian capital. Second, NSE and BSE standards stay intact — their eligibility criteria are a brand promise to crores of retail investors. The incumbents cannot host a pre-commercial regime, and CSE cannot sustain by replicating them. Only clear differentiation lets CSE revive and thrive. Five regulatory reforms enable the shift.First, update the listing regime to permit pre-commercial listings, gated by disclosure and milestones, not financial performance – clinical data for biopharma, tape-out and yield data for semiconductors, flight heritage for aerospace. National missions offer a ready credentialing layer. Skin in the game must bind participants: Firm founder and shareholder lock-ins, plus qualified institutional anchors. Alternative investment funds (AIFs) should be permitted to distribute shares in specie to investors, inheriting residual lock-ins — diversifying the shareholder base.Second, rationalise the accredited investor regime and make it the gate. Consolidate the patchwork of wealth tests into one definition, certified with long validity. Accredited investors, family offices, global institutions and AIF managers get preferred initial access — first-wave allocation, smaller lots — with retail phased in as disclosure accumulates. With this sophisticated base, permit full shorting: A disclosure-gated market stays honest only if exaggeration is punishable by price.AdvertisementThird, consolidate and upgrade the unlisted shares grey market into the dealer network. This market — offline trading at one-way quotes, with spreads invisible to buyers — is the American pink sheets of the 1960s, which NASDAQ’s screens were launched in 1971 to cure. Its intermediaries lack not registration but market structure. CSE should offer it.Fourth, settle through the existing clearing corporations under interoperability. Demat delivers delivery-versus-payment on day one. Mainboard migration should be a right after seasoning, with index inclusion and institutional participation tied to the right metrics — long-term patient capital is ultimately institutional.Fifth, seed the information ecosystem through issuer-sponsored research. India’s vast community of professional and amateur analysts and profusion of tech media will supply the information utilities once there is paper to analyse.Sequencing matters: Quote transparency first, the exchange later. Phase one relaunches CSE as a regulated quotation and trade-reporting platform for unlisted shares — quick to build on demat rails, an immediate investor-protection win. Phase two opens listing to deep tech, subject to conditions precedent: Fresh institutional capital, ownership severed from brokers, regulator-approved governance.Critics will point to fragmentation risk, CSE’s complicated history, and the risk of creating a market for lemons. These require building in shorting, lock-ins and surveillance by design.A revitalised CSE, built for pre-commercial listings, would give scientist-founders a specialised, homegrown destination for listing and enable qualified savers to invest directly in deep-tech enterprises. Locating India’s high-tech exchange at the historic Lyons Range in Kolkata’s Dalhousie area will not just help achieve economic and strategic objectives — it will repatriate the commanding heights of Indian innovation to the soil that once led India’s scientific and industrial development.The writer is founder and managing partner of venture capital fund Navam Capital