Since a majority of the applications do not get funded, many US scientists apply for more grants than necessary. Roy followed the same logic at IISc as well.
Roy had done his undergraduate degree at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur and then headed, as many Indian students do, to the US for his PhD and post-doctoral research. As an undergraduate student 15 years ago, he had some inkling of how things worked in India. Money was scarce, and things took time to happen. Back at IISc in 2012, Roy applied for six projects. All six got funded. “I could not handle six projects at the same time,” says Roy. “I had to return some money.”
In the last 10 years, many Indian scientists have faced a situation like that of Roy that was probably unimaginable a decade ago: an abundance of research money.
India now spends as much money as most developed countries do per researcher employed. India’s research base has expanded in the last decade, as several new institutions were set up. The number of researchers went up, compared to what the country had at the end of the 20th century.
The result has been an explosion of research output from the country. As Prime Minister Modi said at the Indian Science Congress last week, India is now sixth in scientific output in the world. “By 2030, India will be among the top three countries in science and technology,” said Modi, “and among the most attractive destinations for the best talent in the world.” Modi specified that the data was from the SCOPUS database, one of the two databases that track global scientific output.
India has recently moved to fifth position in terms of output. The country is a bit behind in the other database called Web of Science (ranked eighth), which does not take conference presentations into account. In the SCOPUS database, Germany, the UK, China and the US are ahead of India. At the current growth rate of 14%, India has the potential to overtake Germany and the UK after a decade. China and the US are well ahead, with China’s output being 3.5 times and the US 4.5 times that of India.
So Indian science has done well in the last decade and a half, especially when compared to the last two decades of the 20th century.
Since 2004, India has increased its scientific output 3.8 times in the SCOPUS database and 3.4 times in the Web of Science. This increase has been accompanied by an increase in quality, especially in some areas of research. India is already among the top three nations in areas like chemistry, telecommunications and computer science (see The Big Brain Gain).
Why did Indian science suddenly turn around? It was tottering throughout the 1980s and 90s and it appeared then that science was on a nosedive in India. Funding had remained stagnant in the 1990s and India lost a generation of scientists to other countries.
This was a time when the sun had begun to rise on the information technology (IT) services industry and many young minds abandoned science for a career in IT. As the century began, things looked bleak for science: little government support, not enough young minds in research, a widening gap in career prospects between science and other areas, too few research institutions, creaking infrastructure…
Economics of Science
In the early years of the new millennium, senior scientists and secretaries convinced the government of the need to invest more in research. The Indian economy had been growing steadily for some time. Yet, at the end of the 1990s, India was spending just around 0.65% of its GDP on R&D. The government then started a new era of institution building. Funding for research began to go up. New policies and interventions created a different milieu for research.
The first decade of this century saw the second era of scientific institution building, the first being the two decades after Independence. Specifically, India built five new science institutions called the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER). They were modelled on the IITs and some are now producing substantial number of quality research papers. The IIT system too expanded to new centres in the last decade. As the IITs began to focus more on research, they attracted young professors who were committed to it.
Apart from raising funding, successive governments designed schemes to improve research. Scholarships were designed to attract young minds to science. Indian scientists abroad were coaxed to return through generous fellowships. Some areas of science — nanoscience, for instance — were chosen for large investments.
Grants were created to encourage scientists to test their ideas commercially. Money was set aside for new faculty to set up their labs quickly, without wading through viscous regulations.
“Improvements in Indian science,” says T Ramasami, former secretary of the Department of Science and Technology, “have been due to systematic interventions by the government.”
The Congress government of Manmohan Singh continued what the Vajpayee government began, with some blips. The current government too has continued the policy of support for science, once again with some blips. In recent years, philanthropic funding has started flowing in. The Wellcome Trust-DBT Indian Alliance, for example, has a fund of £160 million that has helped foster cutting-edge work in biology. “Since it is an independent body,” says Mukund Thattai of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), “if the project is approved, money comes on the day it is supposed to arrive.” The alliance accepts changes to the proposal if they are reasonable.
Thattai is a recipient of this fellowship. Rich individuals are beginning to fund science too. IISc is establishing a brain research centre with the help of Rs 225 crore from Infosys cofounder Kris Gopalakrishnan. Indian-origin entrepreneur Prabhu Goel created a chair and a research centre at IIT Kanpur. Other philanthropists have donated smaller sums to IITs and other research institutions.
“Because of the flexibility,” says IIT Madras director Bhaskar Ramamurthy, “philanthropic funding lets us make big bets.” Gopalakrishnan has funded three chairs in computational neuroscience at IIT Madras.
Indian competence has increased in many areas. Physics and chemistry have been traditional strengths in India and scientists in these disciplines have continued to do well. India is at third place in chemistry in terms of the number of papers published.
Physicists are behind in terms of quantity but some areas like string theory have done extremely well in the country. Indian string theorists — Ashok Sen of Harish Chandra Institute in Allahabad, Shiraz Minwalla of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Science in Mumbai—are recognised around the world. Big conferences are held in India and Indian physicists participate in global projects.
“Indian physicists are now more integrated into the international physics community than a decade ago,” says B Ananthanarayan, chairman of the Centre for High Energy Physics at IISc. Indian research productivity is high in material science, engineering and telecommunications.
A few other disciplines have come up from nowhere, and researchers are doing topnotch work in them. Computer science is an example. India has had strong groups in theoretical computer science in top institutions and similar groups are now forming in machine learning, computer graphics and computer vision. “We are now a diverse community,” says Madhavan Mukund, dean of studies at the Chennai Mathematical Institute. “The quantity and quality of research is going up but we still don’t do large projects.”
As the country inches to the top inin productivity, the weaknesses of Indian science are still as stark as ever. The peaks are not high enough. Quality drops precipitously when you leave the top institutions.
Infrastructure is not good enough for many frontier areas. India has only two synchrotrons, a vital piece of equipment for biological research, and both are at one institution in Indore. It still takes too long to get chemicals for research, although things have improved in the last decade. Scientists complain about slow release of approved research funds.
Weakness in Numbers
The biggest problem is that the country’s scientific community is too small. India already spends enough money per researcher. But it has too few researchers. In biology, for example, a large research cluster like the Bay Area near San Francisco has more labs than India has. As often mentioned on many forums, India has 200 scientists per million people, too few considering the country’s size.
China has pushed this to nearly 1,000 over three decades. China’s GDP is also five times that of India. A large portion of this missing investment is supposedly in the private sector but there is some uncertainty. “Investments in the private sector are not captured well,” says Ashutosh Sharma, secretary of the Department of Science and Technology. “They are certainly under-reported.” So the private sector spends more than we think they do on R&D. Even with this caveat, science leaders in the country think that India needs to grow its research base.
The missed opportunities in the 1980s and 1990s are now being felt strongly by the scientific establishment. If a country loses a generation of young minds from science, it develops a vacuum in scientific leadership two decades later. India is in that situation at the moment.
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