Research in India ? Data, Prospects and Challenges

Research in India – Data, Prospects and Challenges

News: The government’s approval for a National Research Foundation (NRF) is being widely welcomed by the scientific community.

Background:
• The NRF has the potential to, singlehandedly, address a whole range of deficiencies in India’s scientific research sector that have been flagged for years now.

Status of Research in India:

Expenditure on R&D
• For more than two decades now, the Centre’s stated objective has been to allocate at least two per cent of the national GDP on R&D.
• However, the expenditure on research as a proportion of GDP has gone down, from about 0.8 per cent at the start of this millennium to about 0.65 per cent now. For the last decade or so, this share has remained stagnant.
• Globally, about 1.79 per cent of (world) GDP is spent on R&D activities.
• Israel 5.35%, USA 3.42%, Korea 4.8% (Expenditure on R&D as % of GDP – UNESCO Science Report 2021)
• India spent only 42 US dollars (in PPP terms) per researcher in 2020, compared with nearly 2,150 by Israel, 2,180 by South Korea and 2,183 by the United States.
• Moreover, women comprise only 18 per cent of total scientific researchers in India, while globally this number was 33 per cent.

Research in Universities
• India has nearly 40,000 institutions of higher education, mostly colleges. More than 1,200 of these are full-fledged universities.
• Only one per cent of these engage in active research, according to the detailed project report on NRF.

Research Output
• India produced 25,550 doctorates in 2020-21, of which 14,983 were in science and engineering disciplines. This 59 per cent proportion in the overall doctorates compares well with other countries, putting India in the seventh rank overall.
• But because of India’s large population, this is not impressive in proportional terms. In fact, the number of researchers per million population in India, 262, is extremely low compared with even developing countries like Brazil (888), South Africa (484) or Mexico (349).

Patents
• In 2021, a total of 61,573 patents were filed in India, making it the sixth largest in the world. But this was nowhere close to the nearly 16 lakh patents filed in China, and about six lakh in the United States that year.

What needs to be done?
• NRF will play a pivotal role in streamlining institutions at different levels, increase access and availability of funding. For example, eminent institutions like IITs and IISc get a bulk of research funding but state universities get very little (about 10% of research funds). The NRF will correct this.
• The NRF’s budget will be about Rs 50,000 crore for the period 2023 to 2028. About 70 per cent of this budget will be obtained from the private sector as research investments; the remaining amount will come from the government. Thus, it is important to ensure that consistent funding is on the line of envisaged goals and important research work shouldn’t take the backseat.
• Modalities of seeding, nurturing and promoting research by providing funds to less-endowed institutions and also monitoring outcomes should be transparent.
• It is equally important to ensure that basic research and small-scale research proposals are not brushed aside.
• Funding for Mega projects such as supercomputing and quantum computing mission are not taken from NRF budget.

Way Forward
•  NRF is expected encourage young researchers who have gone abroad to return to India and help benefit India’s intellectual capital.
• If the caveats of centralisation of research funding are addressed before the NRF starts to function, we may soon expect a tsunami of scientific research and development that will propel our country to a technologically advanced state.
Source – Indian Express