Scientific research needs sustained investments
HINGOLI is a town and a district headquarters in the Marathwada region of Maharashtra. It was a part of the territory under the Nizam of Hyderabad till 1948 and was used as a military base. The district is all set to acquire a new identity as the home to a global ‘Big Science’ project called Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). LIGO is a mega physics experiment designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves. Two such observatories are functional at Hanford and Livingston in the US, while two others are in Italy and Japan. Hingoli will be a part of this network once the observatory is ready by 2030. It will have an L-shaped interferometer with 4-km-long arms. The Prime Minister laid the foundation stone for the Rs 1,200-crore project via teleconference during the National Technology Day celebrations at Pragati Maidan in New Delhi last week.
While the scientific community is happy that a large research project is finally seeing the light of the day, the occasion provides an opportunity to examine our approach to such scientific projects, and fundamental research in general.
A consortium of Indian institutions started working on gravitational waves in 2009 and the idea of setting up an observatory in India was born then. The US-based LIGO laboratory formally asked Indian scientists to join its programme in 2011. Research work was initiated and the Indian group submitted a detailed proposal for an Indian LIGO to the Department of Atomic Energy and the Department of Science and Technology the same year. The project was recommended for funding by a committee on mega science projects in 2012.
After facing red tape for four years, the project got ‘in-principle’ approval from the Union Cabinet in February 2016. It took another seven years for the Cabinet to give the final approval to a prestigious mega project backed by some of the finest Indian scientists. That speaks volumes about the so-called ‘ease of doing science’ approach.
The episode is a reflection of India’s stagnating R&D expenditure, which has been a cause for concern for a long time. The Gross Domestic Expenditure on R&D (GERD) as a percentage of the GDP has hovered around 0.7 per cent for a decade now, according to a report published by the NITI Aayog last year. This is lower than even Brazil (1.16 per cent), South Africa (0.83 per cent), and, of course, much lower than China, which spends 2.14 per cent of its GDP on R&D. With such low contribution, the report said, R&D performance is bound to remain stagnant.
Policies set high goals but they are not backed by money and action. The Science Technology and Innovation (STI) Policy of 2013 envisaged positioning India among the top five global scientific powers by 2020. Nine years later, an updated STI Policy, 2022, came up with a reworded and vague goal — placing India among the top five countries in the world in terms of ‘quality of research outcome’ by 2030. Our policymakers fail to understand that no amount of rephrasing of goals can substitute the need for enhanced funding and focus on basic research.
In recent years, the success in Covid-19 vaccine development and manufacturing as well as the development of digital products such as CoWIN and UPI are being cited as proof of India’s growing technological prowess, and rightly so. However, we ignore that these achievements are a result of sustained investments in research and the creation and nurturing of institutions over the decades.
Technical capabilities were built in state-funded national laboratories and higher education institutions and universities for several decades, and these have been utilised by the private sector. Take, for instance, vaccine development and manufacturing as well as the generic medicine business in the private sector. The labs under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) developed capabilities to make drugs and vaccines, clinical trials, etc. since the 1970s, and helped the private sector grow.
Bodies like the Department of Biotechnology and the Technology Development Board handheld biotech firms like Bharat Biotech and Shantha Biotechnics in their formative years. Development funding worth hundreds of crores has flowed to private vaccine manufacturers. All these capabilities developed over the past three decades came in handy when the pandemic struck.
The same holds for achievements in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. Research in computer science, mathematics and physics has paved the way for advancements in IT. Fundamental research in algorithms, artificial intelligence, cryptography and networking led to the development of computers, the Internet and smartphones.
India made early investments in computer science education at the Indian Institutes of Technology, Regional Engineering Colleges (known as National Institutes of Technology now), and later in the creation of the Indian Institutes of Information Technology. All these efforts not only helped the private sector IT industry take shape, but also helped in the development of new digital tools. Government institutions such as the National Informatics Centre, Centre for Railway Information Systems and National Payments Corporation of India have developed e-governance and other digital tools that are powering the digital revolution today.
No country can aspire to be a technological superpower without adequate and sustained funding and focus on fundamental research. Focusing on technological applications based on imported hardware and knowledge is going to make India dependent on others. The investment in basic research also yields several spinoffs, industrial development and societal benefits. Some of the ubiquitous technologies like digital cameras, medical imaging and even the Internet are all spinoffs of basic research projects.
Basic research is playing a vital role in addressing complex global challenges — climate change, public health and food security. R&D in physics, chemistry, materials science and engineering is going to lead to the next breakthrough in renewable energy and sustainability. For the technologies of tomorrow, we need to invest in science today. The writing is on the wall.
