Bharat is now the world’s fifth largest economy and will make it to the third spot soon, but it lags behind on most benchmarks concerning innovation, science and technology. One of the main reasons for this deficit has been Indian academia and industry failing to ramp up its contribution to the national R&D effort. Manufacturing in key sectors has been hobbled by straitjackets in fundamental factor markets of land, labour and capital, as well as faulty trade policies.
Many of these errors have now been corrected, and while much remains to be done, the Make in India momentum is unmistakable with India’s share of global merchandise exports registering fresh highs. Alongside the Make in India push, the government has recognised that the infrastructure to generate patents required an overhaul, and there is a strong effort underway to make it easier and faster to file for and obtain patents for inventions. Recent bilateral agreements in science and technology, especially with the United States, show that the government is correctly identifying strategic priorities in this vital sector, and appreciates that Invent in India has to complement Make in India.
But what will it take for Invent in India to build momentum and scale? The newly established National Research Foundation (NRF) will hopefully address this important issue. The institutions that mediate the flow of capital and resources to convert scientific knowledge into technology-based wealth will require drastic changes to become effective and efficient, so that these institutions power India’s economic output to $10 trillion and beyond in the coming decade by delivering on productivity-multiplying R&D across industries.
The case for such reforms is self-evident — given its wealth of human capital, India has punched well below its weight in science and technology, and the status quo is out of sync with the country’s broader economic aspirations, to put it mildly. As policymakers undertake the arduous but essential task of revamping key scientific institutions, we propose three critical parameters around which to design this overhaul.
First, merit and quality of human capital should be weighted the highest when it comes to staffing and administration of institutions. The bureaucratic mind or administrator’s psyche is geared towards aggregating numbers, but in scientific research, Lotka’s law reigns supreme, and losing the top dozen leaders in a given field to other countries is as good as ceding leadership of that field. The strong power law effect dictates that it matters far less that dozens of others might also be working in the same discipline.
Quantity is no substitute for quality. This reality of scientific research demands that India gears up to both retain its premier talent at home, as well as position itself as a home for talent from abroad. The remittance-seeking mindset of the Licence Raj era needs to give way to a value creation approach.
One of the principal flaws of science policy has been the near-complete separation of teaching and research. The footprint of research labs and centres across the spectrum of scientific institutions is scattered across India — many government labs could enter into structured collaborations with universities and where appropriate, synergise with on-campus science parks that could then expand their activities into industry itself. The idea should be to bring teaching and research together in a merit-driven admissions system.
Second, India should have a barbell strategy for funding research, with high convexity, high payoff projects getting their share of funding from a consortium of government agencies and industry.
There are two precedents for creating this barbell approach: The New Millennium India Technology Leadership Initiative (NMITLI) programme launched in 2003, and the more recent Design-Linked Incentive (DLI) programme. Where NMITLI made collaboration across industry, academia and national labs a standard practice, DLI envisages underwriting innovation with big payoffs in collaboration with high technology businesses, with the India Semiconductor Mission receiving appropriate funding for semiconductor design. We suggest that NMITLI and DLI are reliable models for setting the baseline on R&D, which should be oriented towards industry.
High risk endeavours, which have an outside chance for truly exponential payoffs, almost always originate from individual researchers. For such moon-shot research funding, a greater burden rests on the government even as innovative and entrepreneurial scientists should be encouraged to obtain supplemental funding from industry. Global business history shows how joint efforts by government and industry to fund blue sky research have yielded breakout results in areas such as pharmaceuticals, transportation, chemicals and telecommunications. In several cases outside India where such results were achieved, the underpinning talent was trained in India but emigrated, which underscores the point on retaining our talent and prioritising merit in staffing and administration. Ultimately, bringing industry to the table for such outcomes should be done through the carrot of profit and the stick of competitive pressure.
Finally, alongside the institutional and hardware changes, the culture and software of Indian science too needs a reboot. It is easy to blame politicians for lack of progress, but they act on positions set by science bureaucrats who rely largely on domain experts in academia. Inevitably and unfortunately, this group becomes a self-perpetuating clique, with its own inertia and resistance to doing what is necessary, as that could upset a comfortable status quo.
While good system design for the new setup can incentivise collegiality, undermine hierarchical mindsets, eradicate cartelisation and promote controlled risk taking, eventually long term outperformance will be dependent on the quality and motivations of the people involved in Indian science. Possibly, we are not impolite enough, thereby reducing the quality of impartial peer review. A shakeup is warranted today, as the stakes are high not just for India’s economic progress, but for national security too.
by Rajeev Mantri and Gautam Desiraju
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/for-make-in-india-invent-in-india-8940467/lite/
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