With a vast pool of science and engineering graduates, a large network of institutes and research institutes, and active involvement in some of the forefront areas of scientific research, India is typically a leading country with deep scientific capabilities. counted as one. However, in comparison, India lags behind some countries with much more limited resources in various research indicators.
Chief among them is the money India spends on research and development activities. For more than 20 years, the center’s stated goal has been to allocate at least 2% of the country’s GDP to research and development. Not only has this target not been met, research spending as a share of GDP has fallen from about 0.8 percent at the beginning of the century to about 0.65 percent today. Over the last decade or so, this share has remained stagnant.
This is not to say that research funding has not increased. Expenditure on research has more than tripled over the past 15 years, from Rs 394.37 billion in 2007-08 to over Rs 1.27 billion in 2020-21. However, as India’s GDP grew rapidly, the proportion of research decreased.
At least 37 countries spent more than 1 percent of their GDP on research and development in 2018, the last year for which data for all countries are available, according to the 2021 UNESCO Scientific Report. 15 of these spent more than 2% of him. Globally, about 1.79 percent of (global) GDP is spent on research and development activities. Unlike India, R&D spending growth outpaces GDP growth at the global level.
In response to a parliamentary question in March, the government said India’s total R&D spending in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) in 2018 was about $68 billion, the sixth highest in the world after the US, China and Japan. Said expensive. Germany and South Korea. However, India was far behind. In the same year, the United States and China both spent more than $500 billion.
In 2020, India spent just $42 per researcher (in PPP terms), compared to about $2,150 in Israel, $2,180 in South Korea and $2,183 in the United States.
Moreover, only 18 percent of all scientific researchers are women in India, compared to 33 percent globally.
research at university
India has about 40,000 higher education institutions, most of which are universities. Over 1,200 of them are full-fledged universities. Only 1% of these are engaged in active research, according to NRF’s detailed project reports. Comparative figures for other countries are not available, but it is a well-known fact that universities are the center of research and development activities in most developed countries.
“If I had to name just one area in which I would like the NRF to change, it would be the combination of teaching and research. This is the greatest anomaly in the Indian system. The NRF concept is very focused on correcting this,” said Professor Arindam Ghosh of the Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru.
According to the Department of Science and Technology (DST), there will be 7,888 R&D institutes in the country in 2021, of which more than 5,200 are primarily engaged in industry-specific research in the private sector and industry. The number of private sector also includes 921 industries that “could” conduct research activities.
reaserch result
India will produce 25,550 PhDs in 2020-2021, including 14,983 in science and engineering. His share of the total number of PhD holders is 59%, putting India in seventh place compared to other countries. Even in absolute figures, India is truly the leader in annual production of PhDs in science and engineering, surpassed only by the United States, China and the United Kingdom.
But India has a large population, so this is proportionally less impressive. In fact, India has 262 researchers per million population, which is extremely low compared to developing countries such as Brazil (888), South Africa (484) and Mexico (349).
Between 2001 and 2020, about 94% (34,241 out of 36,565) of Indians who received PhDs from US universities did so in science and engineering, according to DST data. Acquired, which ranks second after China.
publications and patents
According to DST data, Indian researchers published 149,213 papers in scientific and engineering journals around the world in 2020. This is almost 2.5 times more than ten years ago. But that’s still only 5% of all articles. Chinese researchers accounted for 23% and American researchers 15.5%.
A total of 61,573 patents were filed in India in 2021, making it the sixth-most-filed country in the world. But that fell short of the roughly 1.6 million patents filed in China that year and the roughly 600,000 US patents.
