The gaping R&D-sized hole in India’s growth story

A hundred years ago, celebrated cricket writer Neville Cardus flagged the folly of relying on statistics to recognise quality. He stated it in the context of the gentleman’s game. The description holds good for the current state of affairs in Indian science research, where the government flaunts numbers to present a rosy picture, but scientists in the nation's laboratories harbour completely different views.

A few weeks ago, Nature – one of the world’s best-known science journals – came out with an index of the world’s topmost science cities. High R&D spend, concentration of research institutions and specialist facilities, and an ability to attract global science talent were taken into account for the survey.

Going by the Nature index, the top science cities are those whose institutions collectively publish the most output in the 82 high-quality journals, selected by independent committees of 58 leading natural-sciences researchers. Their deliberations were validated by more than 6,000 scientists worldwide.

The list of 200 cities that came out of this exercise has only four Indian cities – Bengaluru at the 97th spot followed by Kolkata (99), Mumbai (132) and Delhi (163). While the index mirrors the realities of Indian science, it also depicts the growth story of China in science. Beijing has emerged as the world’s top science city overtaking New York, Boston and San Francisco. Two of the five top cities are from China – Beijing and Shanghai. Out of 200, there are 26 Chinese cities and 21 of them are in the first one hundred.

Changed trajectory

Why did India, a country that was ahead of China in the 1970s and 80s, fail to maintain the growth?

"We lost 15 crucial years between 1990 and 2005 when the economy opened up and the best talents drifted to other career options that were more lucrative. Without the talents, you can’t do good science,” Samir K Brahmachari, former director general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research told DH.

The statistics collated by the Department of Science and Technology put India among the world’s top 10 countries in terms of research output, but the quality factor remains a concern. India’s research output increased by 50% in SCOPUS (the world's largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature) between 2011 and 2016, and by 36.5% in the Science Citation Index (SCI) in the same period. But this rise doesn’t automatically translate into quality.

In a report focusing on science and engineering by the US National Science Foundation, India’s output has increased by 83% between 2011 and 2018. But the impact of those papers measured in terms of highly cited articles (HCA) remains poor. As against USA’s HCA score of 1.9 and China’s 1.1, India’s score is 0.7.

“The score is similar in SCOPUS and SCI too, but it varies with the discipline. India scores relatively better in computer science, material science and chemistry; fares average in biology and medical sciences and scores poorly in mathematics and subjects related to humanities,” said Vivek Singh, a professor at the Banaras Hindu University who specialises in scientometrics.

Fall from grace

India’s fall from grace in the hallowed area of science research was not sudden but gradual. Until the 1970s, science was a preferred career option. In the 1980s, people began migrating abroad en masse in what is infamously known as “brain drain.”

The real trouble started in the 1990s, with the opening up of the economy which not only created more lucrative job options in the private sector for the youngsters but also led to the entry of foreign players into the Indian market. The science leaders failed to read the writings on the wall and allowed the foreigners to take advantage of India’s market and manpower for their benefits. Meanwhile, China decided to invest massively in science. It led to the creation of a talent pool in the US and European universities initially and was followed by a huge growth in the number of researchers and state-of-the-art facilities in almost all major Chinese cities. This was made possible because of the active support from the federal and provincial governments, which planned years ahead and made the investment with the aim of becoming a global superpower.

In comparison, India’s science budget hovers around 0.6-0.7% of GDP with more than 90% spending by the central government for decades. There is hardly any contribution by the state governments and private sectors. Particularly, the industrial share of R&D needs to go up manifold.

Red tape

To make the matter worse, there is a persistent bureaucratic stifling felt by the researchers at all levels. One common example is the issue of research funding, which follows a three-year cycle in India. Several scientists admitted it was very difficult to receive the fund for the third year because of the paperwork, which was used by the bureaucrats to either deny or delay the third year’s budget. Successive Prime Ministers’ assurance, right from Atal Bihari Vajpayee onwards, to get rid of the red tapes in science administration fell on deaf years.

“Risk aversion is in-built (in the three-year funding cycle) in the way science research is funded in India. One can’t really explore the unknown with such risk-aversion tendency. What can be done at the most is to look for additional evidence of what is known. We lack that foresight as well as investment that the Chinese show. We never plan 10-15 years ahead,” said Partha Majumder, founder director of National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, Kalyani and the president of Indian Academy of Sciences.

Higher education

Money is one half of the problem. There is also a complete disconnect between higher education and research in India’s 900 plus universities. State universities fare badly to such an extent that they can’t even fill up the vacant faculty positions let alone carry out research, as they are robbed of the opportunity to attract talent.

“For the past 20 years, there’s been a steady increase of bureaucratic control of autonomous institutions, which lost their flexibility to attract talents. The investment in science is done in an anti-excellence fashion,” commented Satyajit Rath, a biologist who retired from the National Institute of Immunology, Delhi and currently is a visiting faculty at Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research, Pune.

“The new National Education Policy and National Research Foundation would address this problem by providing resources and mentors at the state varsities. This will allow scientists to be at the universities as nucleating persons to spur the growth of research activities,” said K VijayRaghavan, Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India. He hopes that a new set of government policies would address many such shortcomings.

China, scientists point out, is super flexible in attracting and retaining talent, with world-class remuneration and facilities.

Several researchers DH spoke to narrate a common example. In China, there is not only a monetary reward for publication in a reputed journal, but the authorities also pay the page charges that most peer-reviewed journals demand these days. For Indian researchers, it is a constant struggle to obtain funds to pay for the page charges once their papers are selected for publication in prestigious journals. “We need talented people, flexible policy and the right amount of funding for excellence in research,” said Brahmachari. “There is also a lack of trust by the political leadership on the scientists, compounding the problem,” added Majumder.