The question of India's scientific power is a partial treatment of a large and complex problem. The first point to note is that science is not a single undifferentiated entity. A nation may be doing very well in basic science but may also show poor economic development.
The best example of this is the former USSR, which built up a large, high-quality and internationally significant capability in science but stumbled while converting it into technology and that technology into high-quality goods and services in the market and society.
On the contrary, a country may be very good in technological innovation but be undertaking a limited amount of science research. The best example of this is Japan, followed by South Korea and Taiwan.
The issue of the stock of our scientific and technical personnel has a deeper import.
Numerous studies around the world have shown that a country's ability to secure the benefits of S&T is less dependent on the number of its S&T personnel directly involved in R&D and much more on the diffusion of those personnel throughout the economy in government, business and entrepreneurship, in administrative and management positions and the areas of extension and provision of technical services.
This would make a much larger contribution to GDP and the quality of living of our people. The challenge therefore is more to overhaul the organisational and managerial systems in public institutions providing goods and services to our people and S&T-intensive regulatory agencies in a host of areas from environmental protection, to food and drugs administration.
It is true that the "hype" which IT and ITES have received has given a distorted picture of our capabilities in S&T as a whole. At the same time, we have built up a solid and world-class pharmaceutical industry, whose top 40 players undertake substantive R&D, currently at around 5 per cent of sales, on average, and which are patenting, developing, manufacturing and selling state-of-the-art pharma products, not only at home but in some 60 countries worldwide.
A number of them have set up subsidiaries and joint ventures and even acquired operating companies in some 30 countries including the United States, European countries, and China. What is more, the prices of the medicines made by these companies are one-tenth to one-thirtieth of those in highly industrialised countries.
Then there is the area of telecommunications, where landline telephone exchange, based on technologies developed by C-DoT, constitutes not only almost 80% of the total number of lines in our network but have been exported to some 15 developing countries. The same applies to the Cordect technology, developed by IIT Madras.
We also have significant achievements in technology development, manufacturing and export in auto components and, to a lesser extent, in the area of complete trucks, SUVs and sedan vehicles. We are far ahead of China in all the three sectors dealt with above. These achievements have been realised despite concerns about the state of "science" as a whole.
The concerns about R&D in agriculture are justified. The allocation for such R&D has remained almost static at around 10% of our total R&D expenditure for many years now. Recently, the sector's R&D received a small boost in the form of a National Agricultural Innovation Project, a World Bank-assisted project, involving an outlay of Rs 1,200 crore (Rs 12 billion) over the next five years, with the Bank's near grant assistance amounting to $200 million and that of the government the equivalent of $50 million.
The real reasons for the fall in the contribution of R&D to output are: the sharp decline in the quality of human resources in this sector due to its inability to attract bright young scientists as it did up to around 1990 and to continually increase the productivity of its existing stock of S&T personnel through extensive and intensive training, knowledge adoption and skill upgrade. Besides, there is the issue of poor management at the ICAR.
During the Green Revolution days of 1967-1982, agricultural research intensity, i.e. R&D investment as a percentage of agricultural GDP, was never more than 0.5%. The exhaustion of the first and even second generation Green Revolutions by the late 1990s and the failure of the agricultural R&D community to come up with new innovations in the last decade are part of the problem. Other elements of the "agri-growth package" such as credit, pricing and large-scale adoption of improved post harvest technologies are also to blame.
All this is not to say that we should not be concerned, from a long-term point of view, about the state of science in the country in terms of the number and quality of our young men and women taking up science as a career.
We must. However, that calls for, as has been stated in the editorial, a further increase in our investment on R&D from the present 1% of GDP (compared to China's 1.3%). Incidentally, our percentage was only 0.6 as recently as 2001. The government has to improve salaries and working conditions, including investments, in state-of-the-art laboratories and other infrastructure in our universities in particular.
But much has been done in this regard. There is a major Rs 200-crore (Rs 2 billion) programme of the department of S&T (DST) called "Financing Infrastructure in S&T (FIST)", aimed principally at the universities. Then there is the major R&D project support programme in the universities, also of the DST, through its Science & Engineering Research Council (SERC), currently involving annual disbursements of around Rs 350 crore (Rs 3.5 billion).
But money to do these things alone will not be enough. What is more important and pressing is modernising the work culture in all our publicly-funded S&T institutes, particularly the universities.
In his Budget speech for 2005-06, the finance minister announced an ad hoc additional grant of Rs 100 crore (Rs 1 billion) to the best S&T university in the country, viz. the Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) in Bangalore. The objective was a laudable one--to make IISc come up to world standards in the real sense of the term.
But has it done so? My conversations with its current director do not lead me to such a conclusion. The problem is not one of increased funding alone, but bringing about a cultural transformation. And achieving that goal is and will be a much tougher task.
The author was Scientific Adviser to former prime minister Indira Gandhi.
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