Opinion National Research Foundation’s vision: A chance at genuine innovation

The statement issued on the Cabinet decision has mentioned the many avowed goals of the proposed NRF. NRF will “seed, grow and promote research and development (R&D) and foster a culture of innovation throughout Indian universities, colleges, institutions, and R&D laboratories”, and “will bring focus on need-based research and help support research in the fields of natural sciences, engineering and technology, environmental and earth sciences and social sciences” (agriculture was probably left out inadvertently).

Is setting up NRF a momentous step or is it just the beginning of course correction? Before this question is answered, a reality check of the present state of funding is required. Currently, government funding for R&D is being spent in two modes — core grants and extramural grants. Most of the expenditure is through core grants. In the financial year 2016-17 — for which complete information is available from “Research and Development Statistics 2019-20 by DST” — Rs 42,074 crore was spent by the Central government on R&D. The three major recipients of the funding — DRDO (31.8 per cent), DoS (19.1 per cent), and DAE (11.3 per cent) almost completely work with core grants. The next five — ICAR (10.4 per cent), CSIR (9.5 per cent), DST (8.4 per cent), DBT (3.4 per cent), and ICMR (2.5 per cent) carry out open research, mostly in their own institutions: ICAR has 102, CSIR 38, DST 20 and DBT 15 institutions, all of which mainly funded by core grants.

Only the DST through SERB and DBT spend some part of their allocation on extramural support. In 2016-17, around Rs 2,454 crore (5.8 per cent of the total expenditure on R&D) was spent on extramural grants to fund around 4,711 projects. This small amount served the R&D aspirations of the central universities, state universities including agricultural universities, colleges, deemed universities, institutions of national importance like IISc and IITs, and even the national laboratories. The extramural grants from DST-SERB and DBT have been the lifeline for R&D in the universities and institutions of higher learning in the country.

Yes, India needs a strong competitive grant system as has been proposed by NEP-2020. The number of institutes/universities/medical schools has increased significantly. The number of doctoral students has also increased significantly — doctoral degrees awarded in 2018 were three times more than the number awarded in 2010. However, the overall funding under extramural grants has remained static. This has led to poor doctoral-level training which has very grim consequences for the country.

A competitive grant system provides the necessary leeway to accelerate research in new and emerging areas where interdisciplinarity is critical and can be used for collaborative work among institutions, between institutions and industry, and collaborations across the countries. Almost all the developed countries and newly emerged economies of East Asia have a very strong competitive grant system.

If funding through a competitive grant system is so prevalent worldwide, why does this type of funding constitute such a low percentage of public funding on R&D in India? Why are there so many hurdles and delays in the distribution of funds to investigators? Dealing with R&D through a competitive grant system requires an ability to handle a large number of projects, running into thousands, in a timely and fair manner. The timely release of funding from the government to the implementing agency, and onward to the investigators, is extremely critical.

What has recently bedevilled the extramural system run by DST-SERB and DBT needs to be mentioned. The decline in expenditure by various S&T departments in the Covid year — 2020-21 — was understandable, but the underutilisation of funds in 2021-22 has been a self-inflicted tragedy. A major reason for this dislocation was the insistence of the Ministry of Finance for an immediate switch to single treasury accounts when the S&T organisations or the universities/institutions were clueless about how it would operate.

As for the big picture, we are spending too little on R&D — only 0.65 per cent of our GDP (0.41 per cent by the public and 0.24 per cent by private funding). These investments are much lower than those being made by the developed and newly emerged economies of East Asia (more than 2 per cent of the GDP). Our academies dealing with science, technology, engineering, medicine, and agriculture submitted a report to the Central government in 2022 which contained some pertinent suggestions to improve our R&D ecosystem. These suggestions need to be discussed more widely within the scientific community along with a discussion on the procedural changes that will make the NRF-run competitive grant system a grand success.

A clear positive I see is the Prime Minister chairing the governing board of NRF. The first task of NRF administration should be to implement a time-bound, ICT-based system for managing the projects and disbursing a grant of Rs 3,000 crore in the launch year of NRF, hopefully 2023-24. As for garnering Rs 36,000 crore from non-government sources, it will indeed be an astounding development for R&D in the country if it can be managed.

The writer is SERB National Science Chair and former Vice Chancellor, University of Delhi