New Delhi: A countrywide voluntary organisation of scientists and researchers has issued a public statement in response to the Union government’s recent approval of the National Research Foundation (NRF), the Indian Express reported.

According to the statement, The Breakthrough Science Society has raised concerns against the centralisation of funding under one body as opposed to the multiple avenues available to researchers in the past.

“..the NRF will become the primary agency to decide on and support individual scientists' research proposals. This is a plan for centralization of research support. So far, a researcher had several options in submitting a research proposal. If a proposal gets rejected by one funding agency, it still stands a chance of getting supported by another. Centralisation of research funding eliminates that possibility,” the statement said.

The statement, signed by professor Dhrubajyoti Mukherjee, president of the organisation, continued, “The possibility of obtaining research funds was relatively higher with several funding agencies, each with its own list of thrust areas. But with a single-window for supporting individual project proposals, such scope will be very restricted. Hard-hit will be research in the social sciences and those areas of natural sciences with no short-term industrial spin-off.”

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The statement also pointed out that according to NEP-2020 (article 17.10), the NRF was supposed to be governed by a rotating Board of Governors which will function independently of the government. However, now the Union government has decided that NRF’s Board will be presided over by the prime minister, while the science and technology minister and the education minister will be the ex-officio vice-presidents.

“Even the Executive Committee, which will govern the day-to-day functioning of the NRF, is to be headed by a government-appointed person (the Principal Scientific Advisor). Hence the NRF is not envisioned to function independently of the government,” the statement said.

The researchers expressed their apprehensions about the NRF being headed by political leaders owing to the Modi-led government's promotion of belief-based ideas like panch-gavya, and the so-called ‘Indian Knowledge Systems’.

“The claims by important government functionaries, like the existence of aeroplanes, the internet, television, stem cell research, genetic engineering and plastic surgery thousands of years back – cannot but make scientists apprehensive of the future direction and fate of research under an NRF with such political leaders at its helm,” read the statement.

The researchers' body also called out the Union government's estimated spending through the NRF over the next five years. Of the Rs 50,000 crore allocated to the NRF, Rs 36,000 crore is expected to come from the private sector.

In effect, the government is therefore only spending Rs 2,800 crore per year on research. “Anybody with some idea of the volume of research conducted in India knows that this amount is sorely insufficient even to maintain the present meagre level of support,” the statement read.

The organisation called for governmental support for research to be increased to at least 3% of the country's GDP while opposing ‘the plan of destabilising the existing research support system’ of the country.

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