2006

25/6

Uncategorized

India R&D: The Nehru legacy – Part 1

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In a two-part series Sidin Sunny Vadukut explores the problems with Indian R&D.

In a previous avatar, as a business consultant, I had the opportunity to work on a launch plan for a multi-disciplinary research-oriented university to be funded by a prominent NRI industrialist. The industrialist had set aside a considerable sum of money to fund the project which he intended to leave to the nation as his legacy. We are talking about millions of ‘philanthropy’ dollars here.

Like any good consultant worth his salt I laboured over crafting a sound ‘business case’ for the university. Since the only economic way of securing enough land for the project was a land-grant by one of the state governments, a large part of this effort went towards convincing state governments of the need for such a university. This meant answering questions like why the country needed such a university, why this was an optimal use of land, how this would give back to the state and nation in terms of knowledge and manpower and, more quantifiably, how and when it would pay back in direct and indirect economic benefits. In short we had to show why the state and the nation should give the green signal to such a project.

Private participation in higher education is still a contentious issue. A plethora of regulations make it close to impossible to run a large Indian university feeding off a large corpus as is de rigueur in the United States and Europe. But this was just one of the many facets of our research. Another major part of the research as mentioned above, and the eventual catalyst for this article, was establishing the need for a multi-disciplinary research university in India.

One of the greatest challenges in talking about educational reform in India is to fight the tendency to over-simplify the issue. The need for better education at all levels, primary to post-doctoral, is irrefutable. Who can say no to better universities and better schools? Or more of them? So our research could have ended at that point. One simple powerpoint slide that simply stated one line: ‘India needs significant reform in the education sector to improve existing institutions and establish new ones. Therefore this university makes sense.’

Unfortunately consultants do not work that way. They thrive on supporting every point with a set of support points and each support point then with a set of sub-points and so on ad inifinitum. (Actually till we were sure the client had heard enough.) And in this case the client had an interesting question. Why was the situation, especially in Higher Education, so bad? How had we achieved so little in the fifty-plus years since Independence? (The presumption here being that we had not achieved enough.)

So we set out to find out why. We spoke to a multitude of professors, administrators, policy-drawers and bureaucrats. We asked them a whole lot of questions. Why did we stop winning Nobel Prizes in science after CV Raman in 1930? Why has China overtaken us in published research papers over the last twenty years? (They have and that too by some margin.) Why do we have so few patents coming out of our schools and colleges? Were our PhD programs any good? How much of the money allocated for Science and Technology goes to our institutes and universities? How much of this went to defence and related research? Were our science and technology programs actually giving any returns? Are you aware of innovations that have come out of our IITs and other research facilities that are nationally relevant? Will we ever win a Nobel Prize again?

The responses were sometimes dejected, sometimes angry, often stubborn and, woefully rarely, optimistic. One academic said that the Nobel Prizes was the purview of the west and seldom was won outside: “You just cannot do research and pick up Nobel Prizes by the roadside. Do not judge our research strength merely by the Prizes we win.”

Then, as now, that statement seemed to make more sense than it should. Several people agreed there was a problem in the ‘system’ and private participation was the only key to change the system. There were other observations: Science does not pay here so the best all leave India. Our PhD programs are pathetic and no one is committed to research. Where is the incentive system? Why not improve the new systems instead of establishing a new university? Pay scales do not award individual excellence. Where is the industry interaction that leads to investment?

We had notebooks full of opinions and reactions. But, after poring through so many of them, I still could not clearly find out why in spite of having dozens of institutions we had little research coming out of them. Why were we teaching so much (so many?) and yet researching so little? Every time we thought we had a key causal factor we found that it too boiled down to a simple single problem. We were not doing enough research in our institutions. So after all our interviews we did the next best thing. We Googled.

We hit the first piece of the puzzle almost instantly. The Department of Science and Technology website hosts a few documents that throw considerable light on how money flows into the Science and Technology mechanism in the country. In 2002-03, of the total national expenditure in R&D, 62% was spent by Central Government facilities. Private Sector enterprises spent about 21% of the total. And how much was spent by Higher Education Institutions? A paltry 4.2%. Astonishingly only one part in twenty-five of the total money spent on Research and Development in India was being routed through our institutions of Higher Education. (This is marginally less than the amount spent by Public Sector companies: 5%)

A clear fact emerged from this. After some debate we concluded that India had completely split the teaching and the research processes. While our colleges churned out BSc, MSc and other graduates by the truckloads the actual research and development activity was probably happening nowhere near our classrooms and colleges. Instead India’s R&D happened far away in government run laboratories and research facilties. This was beginning to resolve some of our problems. Our colleges and universities were simply not meant to do research. Merely churn out degrees. And this too, presumably, with scant regard to quality. (At a recent televised debate on education a professor from one of the Indian Insititues of Management had a painful term to refer to the majority of our higher education facilities: ‘junk’ No one batted an eyelid.)

The same document held another striking fact. The Defence Research and Development Organization, the government’s flagship defence research outfit, alone accounted for a third of the Central Government’s spending, or a fifth of total national research spending. The Department of Atomic Energy took up another Rs. 1000 Crores or 5% of the national bill. So roughly a fourth of the total funding towards research went to merely two agencies involved in atomic or defence research.

So finally we were getting somewhere. We knew that one: research and teaching had a severe disconnect and two: a large part of research spend, at least 25% and definitely more, went towards defence and atomic science R&D.

The second finding was one we could understand from a political perspective. Understand but not appreciate. In yet another conversation (we ran up huge telephone bills) with perhaps India’s most famous academic abroad we asked him if this was warranted. The world-renowned academic and author, a person with some policy experience and influence with the government, remarked how this was a grave injustice. He pointed out several areas of research that desperately required attention: high-yield agriculture, managing urban cities, mass transportation, disaster management, alternative power etc. Many of these areas, he said, were of prime importance to the nation at this stage in its development.

“Defend the nation by all means,” he said, “just make sure there is something worthwhile to defend in the decades to come.”

There must be at least one reader thinking of Chandraayan, the Indian Moon Mission, at this point. The ‘national pride’ vs. ‘optimal resource allocation’ debate has raged long and hard for years now and this author has nothing new to present. But those words the academic spoke were mildly haunting.

But even if you accounted for the political/defence aspect of our R&D policy there was still a problem of causality when it came to the teaching-research divide. Why, when for decades most of the advanced western nations had nurtured research centres of excellences adjunct to their universities, had India followed this different ‘bifurcated’ path? And everything indicated it had been so since independence. We went back to our body of academics with this question. No one seemed to have a solid answer. It had always been that way, some said. That was probably Nehru’s vision, said another.

At the end of this second round of note-taking we had little insight but we had one extra word to include in our Google searches: Nehru. We went back to our broadband connections.

And then we hit a motherlode. A vein of pure research gold. The article in question appeared, of all places, in the ‘Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’, fifteen years ago. Suddenly we had several pieces of the puzzle. When we were done with the article and made some more phone calls we uncovered some disturbing truths. A story of how gargantuan egos and poorly directed policy have put our R&D in a bind which it is still struggling to break free from.

End of Part 1 of 2.

In the next part of this two-part article the author will go back several decades in the history of our science and technology policy. We will not only talk of misguided policy but also of the eponymous individuals and the power struggles that, possibly, ended in tragedy. The series will conclude with an overview of the legacy and the critical reforms needed.

[Sidin Sunny Vadukut is an avid blogger and proud author of a book which is currently undergoing a severe quality control program. He wishes to make it clear that he does not internalize too much. He once walked eleven kilometers in pouring rain because of a flash bus strike and the next day ate eighteen idlis with surprisingly little coconut chutney. You can read more of his work at http://sidin.blogspot.com] 

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2006

25/6

Uncategorized

India R&D: The Nehru legacy – Part 1

by | Print
{mosimage}

In a two-part series Sidin Sunny Vadukut explores the problems with Indian R&D.

In a previous avatar, as a business consultant, I had the opportunity to work on a launch plan for a multi-disciplinary research-oriented university to be funded by a prominent NRI industrialist. The industrialist had set aside a considerable sum of money to fund the project which he intended to leave to the nation as his legacy. We are talking about millions of ‘philanthropy’ dollars here.

Like any good consultant worth his salt I laboured over crafting a sound ‘business case’ for the university. Since the only economic way of securing enough land for the project was a land-grant by one of the state governments, a large part of this effort went towards convincing state governments of the need for such a university. This meant answering questions like why the country needed such a university, why this was an optimal use of land, how this would give back to the state and nation in terms of knowledge and manpower and, more quantifiably, how and when it would pay back in direct and indirect economic benefits. In short we had to show why the state and the nation should give the green signal to such a project.

Private participation in higher education is still a contentious issue. A plethora of regulations make it close to impossible to run a large Indian university feeding off a large corpus as is de rigueur in the United States and Europe. But this was just one of the many facets of our research. Another major part of the research as mentioned above, and the eventual catalyst for this article, was establishing the need for a multi-disciplinary research university in India.

One of the greatest challenges in talking about educational reform in India is to fight the tendency to over-simplify the issue. The need for better education at all levels, primary to post-doctoral, is irrefutable. Who can say no to better universities and better schools? Or more of them? So our research could have ended at that point. One simple powerpoint slide that simply stated one line: ‘India needs significant reform in the education sector to improve existing institutions and establish new ones. Therefore this university makes sense.’

Unfortunately consultants do not work that way. They thrive on supporting every point with a set of support points and each support point then with a set of sub-points and so on ad inifinitum. (Actually till we were sure the client had heard enough.) And in this case the client had an interesting question. Why was the situation, especially in Higher Education, so bad? How had we achieved so little in the fifty-plus years since Independence? (The presumption here being that we had not achieved enough.)

So we set out to find out why. We spoke to a multitude of professors, administrators, policy-drawers and bureaucrats. We asked them a whole lot of questions. Why did we stop winning Nobel Prizes in science after CV Raman in 1930? Why has China overtaken us in published research papers over the last twenty years? (They have and that too by some margin.) Why do we have so few patents coming out of our schools and colleges? Were our PhD programs any good? How much of the money allocated for Science and Technology goes to our institutes and universities? How much of this went to defence and related research? Were our science and technology programs actually giving any returns? Are you aware of innovations that have come out of our IITs and other research facilities that are nationally relevant? Will we ever win a Nobel Prize again?

The responses were sometimes dejected, sometimes angry, often stubborn and, woefully rarely, optimistic. One academic said that the Nobel Prizes was the purview of the west and seldom was won outside: “You just cannot do research and pick up Nobel Prizes by the roadside. Do not judge our research strength merely by the Prizes we win.”

Then, as now, that statement seemed to make more sense than it should. Several people agreed there was a problem in the ‘system’ and private participation was the only key to change the system. There were other observations: Science does not pay here so the best all leave India. Our PhD programs are pathetic and no one is committed to research. Where is the incentive system? Why not improve the new systems instead of establishing a new university? Pay scales do not award individual excellence. Where is the industry interaction that leads to investment?

We had notebooks full of opinions and reactions. But, after poring through so many of them, I still could not clearly find out why in spite of having dozens of institutions we had little research coming out of them. Why were we teaching so much (so many?) and yet researching so little? Every time we thought we had a key causal factor we found that it too boiled down to a simple single problem. We were not doing enough research in our institutions. So after all our interviews we did the next best thing. We Googled.

We hit the first piece of the puzzle almost instantly. The Department of Science and Technology website hosts a few documents that throw considerable light on how money flows into the Science and Technology mechanism in the country. In 2002-03, of the total national expenditure in R&D, 62% was spent by Central Government facilities. Private Sector enterprises spent about 21% of the total. And how much was spent by Higher Education Institutions? A paltry 4.2%. Astonishingly only one part in twenty-five of the total money spent on Research and Development in India was being routed through our institutions of Higher Education. (This is marginally less than the amount spent by Public Sector companies: 5%)

A clear fact emerged from this. After some debate we concluded that India had completely split the teaching and the research processes. While our colleges churned out BSc, MSc and other graduates by the truckloads the actual research and development activity was probably happening nowhere near our classrooms and colleges. Instead India’s R&D happened far away in government run laboratories and research facilties. This was beginning to resolve some of our problems. Our colleges and universities were simply not meant to do research. Merely churn out degrees. And this too, presumably, with scant regard to quality. (At a recent televised debate on education a professor from one of the Indian Insititues of Management had a painful term to refer to the majority of our higher education facilities: ‘junk’ No one batted an eyelid.)

The same document held another striking fact. The Defence Research and Development Organization, the government’s flagship defence research outfit, alone accounted for a third of the Central Government’s spending, or a fifth of total national research spending. The Department of Atomic Energy took up another Rs. 1000 Crores or 5% of the national bill. So roughly a fourth of the total funding towards research went to merely two agencies involved in atomic or defence research.

So finally we were getting somewhere. We knew that one: research and teaching had a severe disconnect and two: a large part of research spend, at least 25% and definitely more, went towards defence and atomic science R&D.

The second finding was one we could understand from a political perspective. Understand but not appreciate. In yet another conversation (we ran up huge telephone bills) with perhaps India’s most famous academic abroad we asked him if this was warranted. The world-renowned academic and author, a person with some policy experience and influence with the government, remarked how this was a grave injustice. He pointed out several areas of research that desperately required attention: high-yield agriculture, managing urban cities, mass transportation, disaster management, alternative power etc. Many of these areas, he said, were of prime importance to the nation at this stage in its development.

“Defend the nation by all means,” he said, “just make sure there is something worthwhile to defend in the decades to come.”

There must be at least one reader thinking of Chandraayan, the Indian Moon Mission, at this point. The ‘national pride’ vs. ‘optimal resource allocation’ debate has raged long and hard for years now and this author has nothing new to present. But those words the academic spoke were mildly haunting.

But even if you accounted for the political/defence aspect of our R&D policy there was still a problem of causality when it came to the teaching-research divide. Why, when for decades most of the advanced western nations had nurtured research centres of excellences adjunct to their universities, had India followed this different ‘bifurcated’ path? And everything indicated it had been so since independence. We went back to our body of academics with this question. No one seemed to have a solid answer. It had always been that way, some said. That was probably Nehru’s vision, said another.

At the end of this second round of note-taking we had little insight but we had one extra word to include in our Google searches: Nehru. We went back to our broadband connections.

And then we hit a motherlode. A vein of pure research gold. The article in question appeared, of all places, in the ‘Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’, fifteen years ago. Suddenly we had several pieces of the puzzle. When we were done with the article and made some more phone calls we uncovered some disturbing truths. A story of how gargantuan egos and poorly directed policy have put our R&D in a bind which it is still struggling to break free from.

End of Part 1 of 2.

In the next part of this two-part article the author will go back several decades in the history of our science and technology policy. We will not only talk of misguided policy but also of the eponymous individuals and the power struggles that, possibly, ended in tragedy. The series will conclude with an overview of the legacy and the critical reforms needed.

[Sidin Sunny Vadukut is an avid blogger and proud author of a book which is currently undergoing a severe quality control program. He wishes to make it clear that he does not internalize too much. He once walked eleven kilometers in pouring rain because of a flash bus strike and the next day ate eighteen idlis with surprisingly little coconut chutney. You can read more of his work at http://sidin.blogspot.com] 

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