Emphasising Self-Reliance in Science

Context: India’s Department of Science and Technology recently released a draft of the fifth Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) Policy.

Features of draft STI policy 2020: It aims to achieve the following -

• Technological self-reliance and to position India among the top three scientific superpowers.
• “People-centric” science, technology, and innovation “ecosystem”: to attract our best minds to remain in India.
• Increased Private sector’s contribution to Research and Development (R&D) has been proposed to be doubled every five years.
• STI-driven Atmanirbhar Bharat: by creating a robust, cohesive financial landscape and ensuring a robust STI Governance through -
  • A decentralized institutional mechanism balancing top-down and bottom-up approaches,
  • Focusing on administrative and financial management,
  • Research governance,
  • Data and regulatory frameworks;
  • System interconnectedness.
• Inculcating an inclusive culture in academia: It promises to tackle discriminations “based on gender, caste, religion, geography, language, disability and other exclusions and inequalities”.

Associated challenges in STI Policymaking:

• Lack of funding: R&D investment in science is 0.5% of the GDP; Even elite institutes like the Indian Institutes of Technology are finding it difficult to run their laboratories on a day-to-day basis.
  • Private sector cannot be expected to pay for research: Dehradun Declaration for the CSIR labs has critically analyzed the success rate of the self-financing model.
• Enlarged fattened bureaucracy in science administration: Proposal to create several new authorities, observatories and centres. (leading to reduced autonomy in the name of decentralization).
• Discrimination: In 2019 more than 2,400 students dropped out from the 23 IITs in just two years, with over half of them belonging to the Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe and Other Backward Classes.
• Disconnect between science and society
• Rise of pseudoscience: being propagated in the name of traditional science (in the light of hyper-nationalism). Policy does not provide any mechanism to tackle this.
  • For instance, the proposal by the Rashtriya Kamdhenu Aayog to conduct a national examination under the garb of ‘cow science’.

Way forward:

• Raise funding: to 2% of the GDP as has been the national goal for a while.
  • Investment in basic research by the government: as return on investment in basic research takes too long from a private sector perspective.
• Provide more autonomy: to research and academic centres for financial management.
• Identify and prioritize problems related to cultural and administrative dimensions.

Conclusion: The government has a moral obligation to encourages a mindset that constantly challenges conventional wisdom as well as open-minded inquiry. Only a dissenting mind can think out of the box.