Unease of doing research in India

THE Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi (IITD) and a few other top-ranking research and academic institutions have received notices for payment of Goods and Services Tax (GST) for research funding they received in the past five years. The amount for IITD, with interest and penalties, is said to be Rs 120 crore. While the academic and scientific community has not reacted to the issue openly, entrepreneur and investor TV Mohandas Pai has called it “tax terrorism at its worst”. Just a month ago, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman increased the customs duty on lab chemicals from 10 per cent to 150 per cent in the Budget. Enzymes, reagents and chemicals of high purity are crucial for research and they are usually imported. The bizarre move sent the scientific community into a tizzy as this overnight increased the cost of ongoing and future projects. The steep hike was rolled back in response to an outcry by scientists in the media and on social media platforms.

Innovation can flourish in an environment where the government adequately funds research & development.

These are not isolated incidents that one could brush aside as bureaucratic oversight, but seem to be part of a process to undermine public-funded research and higher education. The tax notice on research funding comes a couple of years after the increase in GST rates on technical tools from 5 per cent to 18 per cent. This made the procurement of scientific and technical instruments, equipment, accessories and consumables very costly. Worried at the likely impact on scientific research, the office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) sent a note to the government mentioning that “while the private organisations may gradually absorb the impact of rate changes, there is a limited space for public-funded organisations to absorb the impact”. The Ministry of Finance tried to pacify the PSA, promising additional allocation of funds to cover the actual impact of the GST hike. Still, the government has done little to ease the situation, as is clear from the recent GST notices and the (now withdrawn) customs duty hike on lab chemicals.

Research and innovation can flourish in an environment where the government adequately funds research, encourages collaboration and creates a suitable ecosystem (regulation, taxation, etc.) to boost research and development. On all these counts, India is doing badly.

India’s funding for R&D is very low — below 1 per cent of the GDP. The much-touted umbrella research funding agency, Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), has been in the making for the past five years. The government has repeatedly claimed that it has substantially increased the funding available for R&D, citing in successive Budget speeches an ‘outlay’ of Rs 50,000 crore over five years for the new agency. The ‘outlay’ is a misnomer. It has been clarified that government funding will only be 30 per cent of this and the rest 70 per cent will be raised from the private sector. If this is so, the state funding will come to a minuscule Rs 3,000 crore a year — which is substantially lower than the current budget of science-related departments. The Ministry of Science and Technology has been allocated Rs 16,628 crore for 2024-25. The ANRF is a clear move to shift the burden of R&D to the private sector, but there is no pathway visible for doing so.

Along with the fund crunch, researchers face red tape in terms of accessing funds, dealing with tax requirements, delays in disbursal of scholarships and fellowships and meeting mandatory conditions like procuring equipment that fulfils ‘Make in India’ requirements. “How will you focus on research if you have to do firefighting all the time?” commented a scientist from IIT-Kanpur on social media platform X. There are other issues that stifle research, such as restrictions on international travel grants and conferences at a time when research in critical areas is becoming increasingly collaborative.

Last year, the Foundation for Advancing Science and Technology (FAST) surveyed researchers of 10 top-ranking institutions to gauge the level of ‘Ease of Doing Science’ (EoDS) — a phrase coined by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015. Only 6 per cent of the respondents rated any parameter as ‘very good’ for EoDS. Within ease of obtaining funds, researchers rated ‘below average’ the factors that are under the control of funding agencies — timeline for processing grants, availability of big money to conduct research and objectivity of the selection criteria. The ease of utilisation of research grants, funding for international travel as well as the availability of equipment and resources were rated the lowest, while receiving grants on time and approvals for disbursement were rated close to average. Overall, the funding process lacked transparency and was unpredictable, the survey found. The funding agencies, according to the FAST study, often do not recognise and relate to the ground realities of experimental research in India.

Another marker of a good R&D ecosystem is the recognition of individual and institution-level excellence through awards and cash incentives. Awards become prestigious either because of their legacy or cash value. Top national science awards that carried the name of eminent scientist Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar have been replaced by a sterile-sounding and generic Vigyan Puraskar with zero financial component. At the time of discontinuing the existing science awards in 2022, the government claimed that the top award — Vigyan Ratna — would be “on the lines of the Nobel”. Last week, the inaugural Vigyan Ratna was announced but it has no cash component, forget about it being Nobel-like. Interestingly, some state-level awards like Vigyan Gaurav and Vigyan Ratna (it is older than the national prize with the same name) given by Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, respectively, carry a prize money of Rs 5 lakh each.

While India grapples with a poor ‘ease of doing science’ index, China is forging ahead. Compared to India’s R&D spend of 0.66 per cent of the GDP, China is spending 2.4 per cent of the GDP on R&D. The budget of just two Chinese universities — Peking and Tsinghua — is more than our entire education budget, as former IITD Director V Ramgopal Rao pointed out recently. India can’t aspire to become a developed country by starving its universities and research institutes of funds, facilities and manpower.