Jugaad: The State of Published Research in India

If India isn’t funding research that results in greater knowledge for everyone, then its lopsided approach to fostering a solid research environment may not yield the same results as other countries.

On 24 September 2014, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully launched Mangalyaan, a Mars Orbiter Mission. Even as it reached the Martian orbit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi lauded the efforts of ISRO scientists and was confident of India’s standing as a scientific superpower in the future.

Without a doubt, it was a momentous occasion in space exploration, both for India and the world – since ISRO joins only three other space agencies in successful efforts to reach Mars’ orbit. ISRO also became the first in the world to achieve success with the Mars mission on its first attempt, and the first agency in Asia.

Understandably, this is quite an illustrious list of accomplishments to be achieved in the short span of three years since the feasibility study was carried out. But there is a component of this story that has received far more attention than others: that the Mars Orbiter Mission was built on a budget of approximately ₹65.93 crore (or $11 million). This was probably why no one in the room was laughing when Modi compared the budget to being less than that of a standard Hollywood blockbuster movie.

The tremendous risks notwithstanding, ISRO is no stranger to achieving challenges in the space exploration realm. The Government of India has granted a little over one billion dollars to ISRO in the past year and unlike most policy issues in India, space exploration and research has not been a contentious one.

Both the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government led by the Congress, as well as the current National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party have consistently allocated funding towards space exploration and research to ISRO. And that’s probably why politicians may not rush to squabble over and claim credit over ISRO’s achievements (although Modi’s speech did refer to his previous government’s efforts in boosting the space research programme) – mainly because the scientists are the ones to have done all the work. And all this only for a billion dollars!

Many Indians (both residing in India, and abroad) have come out with nationalistic fervour not seen outside of Independence Day celebrations to hail ISRO’s recent successes . Surely, there are several reasons to be proud of such a parsimoniously built space adventures (see also: jugaad, what most nuts-and-bolts innovations in India are commonly referred to as), but perhaps it is also important to introspect at this point.

It is not that we shouldn’t be bellowing the trumpets about doing so much with so little, but the fact is that we had so little to begin with: why is India’s spending on science and scientific research best described as shoestring when compared with the budget for other economies where space exploration forms a prominent part of the scientific agenda? The real thought experiment at play here should be “What could have happened if ISRO had more funding.”

Ostensibly, this is never asked, mainly because spending on science and scientific research doesn’t really bring in the votes, unlike unconditional cash transfers.

Research and Development Expenditure: Country-wise comparison

Much has been written about the state of the academic research environment in India, and is best not dealt with here since it would obscure more pertinent observations. India has consistently allocated approximately 1% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) towards research and development (R&D) expenditure, whereas countries such as China, France, Germany, Israel, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States allocate 2% or more.

Considering the size of the economies in the comparison, it would mean a much lower absolute expenditure increase for India to go from 1 to 2% or more of GDP. Of course, the state of R&D in India is only a partial story if we restrict ourselves to looking at budgetary allocations; what is more crucial is the research output by country. Consider the data on the number of scientific and technical journal articles (specific to the fields of physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, engineering, and space) by country in Figure 1.

Figure 1. No. Of Scientific and Technical Journal Articles Published By Country (2000-2009)

Source: World Bank Databank (2014)

There are some interesting trends to note here, even though the data goes only up to 2011 (World Bank 2014) for most countries of interest: China’s growth rate appears to have been exponential over the past decade, despite producing barely half of the output that the United States does. European countries such as France, Germany, and Italy appear unable to keep pace with Chinese scientists, while Japan’s output has been consistently in the top five in the past two decades.

What of India? As evident, Indian research output witnessed steady growth pre-2005 at roughly 7%, but jumped by nearly 11% between 2005 and 2007. As a side note, one can also observe the plateauing of growth in the number of articles published during the years of the Great Recession (2007-2010) for almost all countries. Promisingly, India’s scientific and technical research output has reached a peak in 2012 (nearly 22,500 articles were published by Indian scientists).

R&D Expenditure and Published Research Output

Just to be sure, it is worth investigating what the cost of doing research (on a per-article basis) is in different countries around the world: how many articles are published relative to the funding that is granted to support such research (Figure 2)? India is surprisingly among the top 6 in terms of a crudely-computed cost-per-article. Furthermore, when weighted by the number of researchers per million people in the country, India’s cost soars well above the rest. This is further evidence of the imbalanced research environment in India, both in terms of number of researchers as well as cost-per-article.

This might be on account of either the relatively low publication rate of Indian scientists, or due to the small share of R&D funding (or due to the lower absolute number of researchers in India). Since the latter issue may be a bit less intuitive, consider for example, the case if India’s R&D expenditure disproportionately goes into funding research in ISRO projects, while in the US, the distribution of R&D funding may be far less concentrated.

In that case, India’s cost-per-article would be far higher than the US, since exactly how much of the entire R&D budget is spent on organizations/institutions/research studies that focus on published research output is unclear.

And therein lies an important lesson to learn – if India isn’t funding research that results in greater knowledge for everyone (assuming that published articles are widely read in the global scientific community), or in high-quality externally valid research, then its lopsided approach to fostering a solid research environment may not yield the same results as other countries. Essentially, it might not achieve the kind of scientific success that other developed countries (and China) are working towards.

Figure 2. Cost-Per-Article By Country (2000-2011)

Source: World Bank Databank (2014)

The Danger Ahead

While Indian innovation in science and scientific research will continue, just as government support for this endeavour has been consistent. But the status quo may be unsustainable, given that the overall R&D budget in India does little to focus on published research and thus, externally valid research that could have far-reaching impacts.

Perhaps India would be satisfied funnelling the majority of its research budget allocation to agencies like ISRO, secretly hoping that jugaad never leaves the blood of the average Indian scientist.

We have not even here considered funding for several important research areas beyond the ‘hard’ sciences: the humanities and social sciences are probably just as crucial (and are more likely to be produced on an even lower budget in India) as funding ISRO’s next big project to the Sun. Maybe space exploration is closer to our hearts than improving the research environment in India.

References on next page

References:

Anand, A (2014): “Shoestring Theory: India’s Pioneering Budget Space Probe is Halfway to Mars”, The Guardian, May 2, 2014. Accessed on 24 September 2014 (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/02/india-mars-probe-mangalyaan)

Choudhury, S and J Sugden (2014): “How India Mounted the World’s Cheapest Mission to Mars”, The Wall Street Journal India, Sept 23, 2014. Accessed on 24 September 2014 (http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2014/09/23/how-india-mounted-the-worlds-cheapest-mission-to-mars)

Gallego, J and L Wantchekon (2012): “Experiments On Clientelism And Vote-Buying”. Research in Experimental Economics, 15, 177-212.

Government of India (2014): “Budget 2014-15, speech of Arun Jaitley, Minister of Finance”, Ministry of Finance, July 10, 2014. Accessed on 24 September 2014 (http://indiabudget.nic.in/ub2014-15/bs/bs.pdf)

Lele, A (2014): “India’s 2014–15 Space Budget: An Assessment”, The Space Review, March 17, 2014. Accessed on 24 September 2014 (http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2471/1)

OECD (2011): “Governmental budgets for space activities”, in The Space Economy at a Glance 2011, OECD Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264113565-6-en

The World Bank (2014): World Bank Databank at databank.worldbank.org, last updated Sept 16, 2014. Accessed on 24 September 2014.