Amid the stir caused by Bharat Ratna awardee CNR Rao dubbing politicians as “idiots” for ignoring the needs of the scientific community, it is unfortunate that only his grouse against politicians took centre stage. The pressing issue which the eminent chemist, who has done path-breaking work in solid-state and structural chemistry, attempted to foreground was the pathetic spending on research and development (R&D). India spends 0.5 per cent of the global spending on science but produces 2 per cent of the world’s scientific literature. That the political community has responded with surprising restraint to his criticism speaks of the stature of the man and the legitimacy of his grouse. Science and Technology (S&T) minister S Jaipal Reddy, agreed with Rao’s views, but blamed the economic slowdown for the inability to hike R&D spending.

India’s expenditure of $36 billion in 2010 on R&D was a paltry 0.9 per cent of its GDP. In contrast, over 30 countries spend between 1 and 4 per cent of their GDP on R&D. For the past 20 years, a period coinciding with economic reforms and greater wealth generation, the fraction of GDP spending on science has stagnated. In this same period, some of the problems facing the country — climate change, energy and food security, employment generation, defence, water scarcity and degrading ecosystems — have aggravated. The Scientific Advisory Council (SAC) to the Prime Minister, incidentally headed by Rao, has been insisting that indigenous scientific resources be deployed to tackle these problems. In a 2010 vision document, the council cited the example of the US where almost 85 per cent of GDP growth could be attributed to technological change, even before the information technology revolution began.

To achieve any meaningful advance towards meeting development goals, the political leadership must see merit in the scientific community’s consistent demand that R&D spending be steadily increased to 2-2.5 per cent of GDP. In countries like South Korea, the private sector spends more on R&D unlike India where the development of a robust indigenous private sector was not a priority before or after the economic reforms of 1991. For decades, India was well-served by a few eminent institutions established in the immediate pre- and post-Independence years. Among those venerated as modern heroes were a number of scientists too, including CV Raman, JC Bose, Homi Bhabha, SS Bhatnagar and Vikram Sarabhai. But as the country lurched through multiple political and economic crises, priorities began to get muddled and institution building suffered.

Ironically, the stagnation in science and technology commenced even as India deployed technocratic solutions to improve foodgrains yield and tided over crippling food scarcity in the Sixties. The paucity of resources in pure sciences research has led to homegrown talent migrating abroad.

In the past decade, the lone silver lining was the establishment of six Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER). The SAC under Rao has set ambitious targets, in terms of PhDs, research papers and patents, that will require liberal funding. It envisions the awarding of 20,000 PhDs by 2025 from 8,420 in 2005-06, with India’s share of scientific publications rising to 10 from 2 per cent now, and the number of Indian international patents growing from 1,900 in 2007 to about 20,000 per year by 2020. Rao’s outburst indicates these targets may never be met.