New Delhi: The Union finance minister has announced a Rs 1 lakh crore corpus to boost private sector research in “sunrise domains” like biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and renewable energy. This move has raised concerns among scientists about potential cuts in government science department budgets and a perceived lack of support for basic sciences.
“Any big investment that will push research is welcome,” Partha Majumder, emeritus professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, told the Telegraph. “But I wonder why the government wishes to encourage only research and innovation in the private sector. I wish it had concurrently increased the budget for science and technology significantly,” he said.
The interim budget proposes a 1.2% increase in the outlay for the department of science and technology, a 0.7% increase in the outlay for health research, and a 16% dip in funds for the biotechnology department.
“Any increase below the rate of inflation is effectively a decrease,” Ayan Banerjee, professor of physics at IISER Calcutta, told the daily. “Given these trends, where is the corpus money going to come from?”
Rajesh Gokhale, secretary in the department of biotechnology, told The Telegraph that the outlay for biotechnology had decreased because certain COVID-related initiatives had ended.
In the previous budget, the government had proposed the establishment of the National Research Foundation (NRF) in alignment with the recommendations of the National Education Policy (NEP), with a budget allocation of Rs 50,000 crore. However, the specifics of this proposal remain unclear to date.
The Union government had declared that the prime minister would serve as the ex-officio president of the NRF board, given the broad-ranging scope of the body that has implications for all ministries. Additionally, the Union minister of science and technology and education will hold ex-officio positions as vice-presidents of the NRF.
Scientists and researchers expressed concerns over the NRF’s political leadership. They cited apprehensions related to the Modi-led government’s endorsement of belief-based concepts such as panch-gavya and the so-called ‘Indian Knowledge Systems’.
Also read: The National Research Foundation Bill Is a Threat to Publicly Funded Science
India’s R&D spends is among the lowest in the world, according to a NITI Aayog study, published in 2022.
Some experts argue that allocating less than 0.5% of the GDP to R&D is insufficient.
Gopichand Katragadda, who was earlier the group chief technology officer and innovation head at Tata Sons and former managing director at General Electric’s Indian R&D centre, told Hindustan Times that it is better not to spend anything at all on R&D than spend 0.5% of the GDP or less.
“There’s not going to be any outcome if the spend is insignificant. Our R&D spend should cross 2% of the GDP,” he told the daily. “But it’s a good start,” he said, referring to the corpus.
