The draft New Education Policy 2019 may be in the public domain for critical feedback, and yet to be adopted, but at least one of its proposals—the setting up of a National Research Foundation—has already got the government's clearance.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in the course of her budget speech, said they proposed to establish one to fund, coordinate and promote research in the country.
Research and innovation are the new mantras for progress in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's New India, and numbers speak more eloquently than words.
Budget 2019 allocated a total of Rs 608.87 crores under this head, up from Rs 243.60 crores that was spent in 2018-19.
Compare this to the allocation for Digital India e-learning—Rs 579.00 crores, just slightly higher than the Rs 511.30 crores that was spent last fiscal.
The National Research Foundation, in fact, is going to be a new arrangement with existing resources, but with a new mandate. The NRF will assimilate the research grants being given by various ministries independent of each other, the minister said.
The objective of the NRF proposed by Dr K. Kasturirangan, who chaired the committee for NEP, is to catalyse and energise research and innovation across the country in all academic disciplines, with a special focus on seeding and growing research at universities and colleges—creating a conducive ecosystem for research through competitive peer-reviewed funding, mentoring, and facilitation.
He illustrates the need for research and innovation thus: The levels of investment in research and innovation in India have not grown but steadily dropped over the last decade—from 0.84 per cent of GDP in 2008 to around 0.69 per cent in 2014, where it remains today. “For the sake of comparison, the levels of R&I investment as a proportion of GDP in some other countries are: United States (2.8 per cent), China (2.1 per cent), Israel (4.3 per cent), and South Korea (4.2 per cent). They all invest at least three times as much as a proportion of GDP. “ he says.
A former chairman of ISRO, Dr Kasturirangan says this is reflected in our research-output numbers. The number of researchers per lakh of population is 15 in India, compared to 111 in China, 423 in the United States, and 825 in Israel (Economic Survey of India 2016-17).
As a direct consequence, India severely lags behind in the number of patents and publications produced: according to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), China made as many as 13,38,503 patent applications, with just 10 per cent being made by non-resident Chinese, the USA made 6,05,571 patent applications, while India made a mere 45,057, of which over 70 per cent were by non-resident Indians.
The budget speech also gave away the government's acceptance of the NEP idea of making Indian education world class, and bringing in foreign student.
The finance minister's pride in the fact that three Indian institutitions made it to the world's top 200 rankings, on the strength of their research work only reinforces the government's focus on research and innovation.
