‘India Must Increase R&D Spending To 2% Of GDP By End Of 12th Plan’
Bhubaneswar: The ‘China vs. India’ debate saw Prime Minister Manmohan Singh noting that India's relative position in the world of science is declining, and the nation has been overtaken by countries like China.
Speaking at the 99th Indian National Science Congress here on Tuesday, the PM’s inaugural lecture meant to celebrate scientific advances in India was tempered with some hard facts and hints of why research in the country is lagging.
“As far as resources are concerned, the fraction of GDP spent on R&D in India has been too low and stagnant. We must aim to increase the total R&D spending as a percentage of GDP to 2% by the end of the 12th Plan Period from the current level of about 0.9%,” the PM said.
He accepted that one-fourth of the research contribution is coming from the private sector. But his suggestion that this has to increase further was in part an indictment of public sector research centres.
“We have to increase public private partnerships and catalyze significantly increased interaction between publicly owned S&T institutions and industry,” Singh said.
“It is in some ways ironic that GE and Motorola have created world class technology hubs in India, while our own industry has not done so, except perhaps in the pharma sector,” he added in a criticism of the science policy as well as domestic industrial giants.
While Singh did reaffirm that “India had moved from the 15th rank in 2003 to 9thposition in 2010 with respect to the number of publications in peer valued journals”, he also pointed out that India lagged behind on applied sciences and the focus was fixed more on fundamental research. .
Union science and technology and earth sciences minister Vilasrao Deshmukh too made a comparison with China, claiming India was lagging behind on applied sciences. “China publishes five times more patents than India,” he said.
The PM also reflected on how students of sciences shifted to other careers after education. “While it is true that science and engineering continue to attract the best students, many of them later opt for other careers because of poor prospects in science.”
He also referred to a recent survey of 2,000 Indian women Ph.Dholders in science, which had found that 60% of them were unemployed. He noted that the main reason was discrimination, and contrary to popular perception ‘family reasons’ was cited by only a few in explaining their unemployment. Geetha Bali, the chairperson of science congress and vicechancellor of Karnataka State Women’s University, noted that the number of women employed at the high-end of research institutions and academia have declined disproportionately. The facts appear grim considering the theme for this year’s congress is the role of women in science.
No comments:
Post a Comment