This list of Indian inventions and discoveries details the inventions, scientific discoveries and contributions of India, including those from the historic Indian subcontinent and the modern-day republic of India. 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 within territory of India, as such does not include foreign technologies which India acquired through contact or any Indian origin living in foreign country doing any breakthroughs in foreign land. It also does not include not a new idea, indigenous alternatives, low-cost alternatives, technologies or discoveries developed elsewhere and later invented separately in India, nor inventions by Indian emigres or Indian diaspora in other places. Changes in minor concepts of design or style and artistic innovations do not appear in the lists.

Ancient India

Agriculture

Construction, civil engineering and architecture

Finance and banking

Games

Textile and material production

Well-being

Medicine

Equestrianism

Metallurgy, gems and other commodities

Metrology

"A total of 558 weights were excavated from Mohenjodaro, Harappa, and Chanhu-daro, not including defective weights. They did not find statistically significant differences between weights that were excavated from five different layers, each about 1.5 m in thickness. This was evidence that strong control existed for at least a 500-year period. The 13.7-g weight seems to be one of the units used in the Indus valley. The notation was based on the binary and decimal systems. 83% of the weights which were excavated from the above three cities were cubic, and 68% were made of chert."

Weapons

Philosophy and logic

Mathematics

"'It is India that gave us the ingenuous method of expressing all numbers by the means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position, as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit, but its very simplicity, the great ease which it has lent to all computations, puts our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions, and we shall appreciate the grandeur of this achievement when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest minds produced by antiquity.'"

Linguistics and Literature

सकारनानारकास- कायसाददसायका । रसाहवा वाहसार- नादवाददवादना ॥ sakāranānārakāsa- kāyasādadasāyakā rasāhavā vāhasāra- nādavādadavādanā. "'[That army], which relished battle (rasāhavā) contained allies who brought low the bodes and gaits of their various striving enemies (sakāranānārakāsakāyasādadasāyakā), and in it the cries of the best of mounts contended with musical instruments (vāhasāranādavādadavādanā).'" Palindromic Novel: The Ramakrishna Vilomakavyam by Dyvagnya Surya Pandita is an example of a narrative that, when read forward, relate the story of the Ramayana and, when read backward, relate the story of the Mahabharata.

Mining

Space

Miscellaneous

Modern India

Medicine

Electronics and communications

Computers and programming languages

Construction, civil engineering and architecture

Finance and banking

Paleontology

Zoology

Genetics

Metallurgy, manufacturing, and industry

Metrology

Rocket science and jet propulsion

Science and technology

Weapon systems

Automotive innovations

Mathematics

Sciences

Space