What Prevents India From Becoming World-Class Research & Innovation Hub?

India is often called the land of paradox. Here the world’s wealthiest live next to the poorest. It is one of the world’s fastest growing economies but slowest in human development; we are working to build smart cities but large swathes of our rural areas remain without the most basic amenities. It has the world’s third largest higher education system but is among the lowest in research and innovation output; the contrast is sharp and wide.

This stark dichotomy never became so apparent as it did in the times of COVID-19 pandemic when our country considered as Asia’s medical tourism hub with some of the finest healthcare institutions and doctors saw its public health system getting overwhelmed by the rapid virus spread. The myriad gaping holes in India’s healthcare system were laid bare – shortage of doctors and nurses, ICU beds, ventilators, diagnostic labs, PPE kits and absolute lack of data. Even though late, the development of the indigenous COVID-19 vaccine and our high production capability in short time were the only saving grace.

The pandemic has, in particular, drawn our attention to the country’s atrocious research and innovation ecosystem. We have often failed to understand why is that India fails to make a mark in world-class research and innovation when at the same time Indians are making some of the most amazing inventions and discoveries abroad and are leading some of the world’s biggest technology companies.

Foremost, it is crucial to understand where we stand in the global research and innovation ecosystem; why we are there and how we can move ahead.

Let’s figure out first, how many researchers do we have in a country of 130 million people? India has 216.2 researchers per one million inhabitants, against 1,200 in China, 4,300 in US, and 7,100 in South Korea, according to 2019 Brookings India report.¹

The number of international patents filed by a country is the benchmark of its research and innovation environment. While China filed the maximum number of international patent applications (58,990) with the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2019 leaving US behind (57,840), India filed a mere 2,053 applications trailing way behind small countries like South Korea (19,085) and even Turkey (2,058).² Also, it is important to assess how many of these innovations translated into policies easing lives of our country’s common man.

Publication of scientific journals and papers is a key yardstick of research and innovation in a nation. A majority of the impactful and influential journals are published from the US. India has very few worldclass journals and majority of our top scientific papers get published in foreign journals. The presence of an increasing number of predatory journals with scant peer review and poor plagiarism checks prevents India from becoming a global publisher of highly regarded journals despite having top class researchers.

With reference to scientific papers, India’s contribution has increased considerably in the last decade but still has a long way to go. According to the data compiled by the US National Science Foundation, China produces the maximum number of scientific papers in the world, ahead of US. India is now the third largest producer of scientific papers in the world with 1,35,788 papers published in 2018.³ However, the low number of citations puts a question mark on the quality and impact of our research papers.

Our higher academic institutes, universities and major scientific institutions have been doing little in research, one of the key factors responsible for low innovation output of India.

So, why is that we are not there where we ought to be? India’s investment in research and development is significantly lower than the top ten economies of the world and the lowest among the BRICS countries as per the recent UNESCO Science Report. Its gross domestic expenditure on research (GERD) has been a mere 0.7% of the GDP for the past several years. The investment in R&D majorly comes from the government in India unlike the US and China where private enterprises largely support it.

The funding for R&D in higher educational institutions such as universities is miniscule. Research in India is not considered as a key academic activity and our universities have become mere centres of teaching and examination. Teachers in higher institutions – ranging from premier ones to state universities – are largely saddled with teaching owing to high work pressure and staff shortage, leaving them with little time to innovate both inside and outside classrooms, eventually leaving them dispirited.

The situation is no different for medical practitioners who spend most of their day consulting and doing administrative work with little time and energy left for research and innovation. In 2019, resident doctors of some of the country’s top medical colleges launched `I Am Overworked’ campaign to draw the government’s attention on how the medical profession was heading for a burnout.⁴ Some doctors said they worked from 8 am to 4 am on some days of the month.

Those few who manage to juggle between OTs, OPDs and then publishing research papers often do so to comply with regulatory requirements for promotions rather than passion for research. An Elsevier study across a threeyear period (2014-2017) revealed that India produced 5,64,369 publications of which only a mere 10.6% were on medical research.

A healthy research ecosystem in universities nurtures cutting edge courses, attracts top teachers, leads to superior research publications and international collaborations. India must learn from China and South Korea who reinvigorated their education systems in the past two decades by making their universities the hub of R&D and world class publications.

It is not that there is dearth of ideas from our institutions, our doctors and professors, but there is dearth of the right mindset at the administrative level. An IIT filed 184 patents even during the pandemic. But it is everyone’s guess that these will remain as patents and will probably never touch or improve the lives of common man. This is because most of the innovations done on campuses remain on campuses as government procedures are riddled with red-tapism. A premier public technical institute did not even make it to the bidding stage for its unique Covid testing product owing to ‘private lobbying’.

Such continued disappointments eventually result in our youngsters migrating abroad. A 2018 Boston Consulting Group survey revealed that 90% of Indians wish to go abroad and work. The reasons are not too far to seek.

Lack of relevant data is another key hurdle for quality evidence-based research in India. The COVID-19 crisis has been a major revelation about the lack of patient records and health data which could have been key to disease surveillance and more efficient response to the pandemic. Less than 5% of medical data from patients is being collected in the country with only 400 of 62,000 hospitals collecting relevant medical information of their patients.⁵ Data collection is important for any health system but is not being done systematically and poor data are inadequate for informing health policy.

Now, what can be done to foster world class research environment in India? The first and foremost, the government should immediately devote at least 2% of GDP on research and development, the threshold fixed by the Science and Technology Policy 2003, but has been pushed back ever since. India’s spend on R&D has been abysmally low compared to some of the big countries like the US and China and even smaller countries like Israel (4.95% of GDP), South Korea (4.23%), and Finland (2.77%).⁶

On the lines of US and China, India must allow major investment in R&D by corporate enterprises, private foundations and philanthropists. The industry can drive both fundamental and applied research. The robust link and support from the industry will help create a solid R&D infrastructure and right facilities in universities. Including ‘research’ under the ambit of Corporate Social Responsibility could go a long way in ensuring a sustained funding for research and innovation, particularly in higher academic institutions.

Next, it is time we started encouraging and incentivising our researchers. A financial reward structure for researchers for publishing papers in global and top domestic scientific journals will make them more productive and effective as well as make them feel valued. The lack of any such incentives is one of the reasons for our best of the universities and institutions having extremely low research output. Faculty and researchers in higher educational and other institutions should be encouraged to engage in R&D, their teaching hours should be reduced and their administrative workload considerably taken off. The reward programme can have set benchmarks such as number of papers published, number of citations and number of patent applications filed. China again is a wonderful example of how decent incentives can drive research and innovation in the country.

Rewarding peer reviewers too and putting in place stringent plagiarism norms will help foster high-quality publication environment in the country.

Also, all prominent research bodies including CSIR, ICMR and ICAR should publish their own niche journals and maintain a record of published papers and citations in their own areas.

It is high time India took some major policy reforms to create a robust, sustainable high-quality research and innovation environment, and reduce dependence on US and Europe. Increasing spending on R&D and capitalizing our huge higher education network of more than 51,000 institutions can prove to be a game changer for India’s research landscape.

Funding

This study did not receive any funding

Conflict of interest

No conflict of interest between authors