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Proposed National Research Foundation would spend $6 billion over 5 years, but is drawing mixed reactions
The Indian government has announced an ambitious plan to create a new National Research Foundation (NRF) that would pump $6 billion into research over 5 years. But it is drawing mixed reviews from scientists.
Although few details are available, many researchers are welcoming the proposal to create a new “apex body” for Indian research, saying it could help boost the nation’s relatively meager investments in basic and applied science. But some worry the foundation might fall prey to political interference. They are also skeptical it will be able to attract the envisioned funding, 70% of which is supposed to come from private industry. That goal is likely “a little unrealistic,” says policy specialist Shailja Vaidya Gupta, a former senior science adviser to the government.
The NRF proposal, unveiled on 28 June by India’s Union Council of Ministers, is rooted in a 2019 report requested by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The report, from the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council, noted that India lagged far behind other large nations in the share of gross domestic product (GDP) it spends on research and in the quality of research papers and patents it produces. Many Indian universities, it added, do not conduct any research.
To help reverse those trends, the report called for a powerful new research agency, similar to the National Science Foundation in the United States, which would help coordinate science policy and consolidate and expand funding, including peer-reviewed grants to academic researchers. The agency’s annual budget should equal 0.1% of India’s GDP, or more than $2 billion at the time, it said. To protect the agency from political pressure and bureaucratic red tape, the report recommended that an independent board of prominent scientists choose its leaders, and that it operate with “complete autonomy … so that it does not face hurdles in funding good projects.”
The new proposal departs substantially from that vision. It calls for the prime minister to preside over NRF’s board, for example, and for the government’s science and education ministers to fill two other top jobs. The science ministry and India’s science adviser will also help oversee NRF and its governing board.
Having the prime minister occupy such a senior role “tells you the seriousness [with] which we want to take the R&D ecosystem,” says Ajay Sood, the government’s principal science adviser. And researchers say the structure means the foundation could prosper under politicians who support its mission. “It’s not a bad idea for the prime minister to be at the helm,” says Partha Majumder, founder of the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics and a member of India’s Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), created in 2008 in an earlier effort to address funding struggles.
NRF’s links to powerful politicians could also help it attract industry support, Majumder says. Senior government officials “can probably talk to industry much more effectively than a bunch of us,” he says.
But the arrangement could expose NRF to political meddling, warns the Breakthrough Science Society, an advocacy group. It notes that Modi’s government has sometimes promoted fringe, pseudoscientific ideas—such as claims that ancient Hindus invented aircraft and the internet. That “cannot but make scientists apprehensive of the future direction and fate of science research under an NRF with such political leaders at its helm,” the society said in a statement.
India’s notoriously ponderous bureaucracy could pose another threat to the new agency, says Gupta, who worked on the NRF proposal in 2020 when she was a government official. Because the foundation would not be an independent agency, it will “have to adhere to rules which apply across sectors,” she says. “So, if you’re building a bridge, or you’re discovering new proteins, you are treated the same way.”
The plan calls for NRF to subsume SERB. Ultimately, the government says the foundation will receive more public money than it gave to SERB. But, overall, officials are counting on the private sector to contribute more than $4 billion of NRF’s funding from 2023 through 2028.
Sood acknowledges that “these are aspirational numbers.” But he says they reflect the government’s desire “to bring other people [on board and] make them co-partners in the R&D and innovation ecosystem.”
Still, others are skeptical. “Banking on the corporate sector to pitch in with a sum exceeding [the] government commitment is a wild dream,” the Breakthrough Science Society said.
It’s been difficult to fully assess the NRF proposal, researchers say, because the government will not publicly release the legislation creating the foundation until it is passed by India’s parliament. “It shouldn’t be this way … [the draft bill] should be up for public debate before we could put it up into the parliament,” Gupta says.
Action on the bill could come as early as this summer, with Parliament scheduled to hold its Monsoon Session from 20 July to 11 August.
