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BHUBHNESHWAR: The 'China versus India' debate continues to rankle the government at all levels was evident with PM Manmohan Singh noting that "India's relative position in the world of science had been declining and we have been overtaken by countries like China." He was speaking at the 99th Indian National Science Congress at Bhubhneshwar on Tuesday.
His inaugural lecture meant to celebrate the scientific advances in India came tempered with some hard facts and some subtle hints of why research in India lags behind the world.
"As far as resources are concerned, the fraction of GDP spent on R&D in India has been too low and stagnant. We must aim to increase the total R&D spending as a percentage of GDP to 2% by the end of the XII Plan Period from the current level of about 0.9%," PM said.
He accepted that already one-fourth of the research contribution was coming from the private sector. But his suggestion that the contribution had to increase further was in part an indictment of public sector research centres across the country.
"We have to increase public private partnerships and catalyse significantly increased interaction between publicly owned S&T institutions and industry," Singh said.
"It is in some ways ironic that GE and Motorola have created world class technology hubs in India, while our own industry has not done so, except perhaps in the pharma sector," he added in a criticism of the science policy as well as the domestic industrial giants of the country.
While Singh did reaffirm that "India had moved from the 15th rank in 2003 to the 9th rank in 2010 with respect to the number of publications in peer valued journals" he also pointed out that India lagged behind on applied sciences and the focus was fixed more on fundamental research. .
Speaking before PM, the Union science and technology and earth sciences minister Vilasrao Deshmukh too had evoked a comparison with China to claim that India was lagging behind on applied sciences. "China publishes five times more patents than India for every billion US dollars of GDP," he said.
Manmohan Singh also reflected on how students of sciences shifted to other careers after education. "While it is true that science and engineering continue to attract the best students, many of them later opt for other careers because of poor prospects in science." He also referred to a recent survey of 2000 Indian women PhD holders in science which had found 60% of them unemployed. He noted that the main reason was discrimination and unlike the public image, 'family reasons' was cited by only a few in explaining their unemployment.
Speaking before him, the chairperson of the science congress Geeta Bali who is also the vice-chancellor of Karnataka State Women's University had noted that the number of women employed at the high end of research institutions and academia declined disproportionately.
China ahead of India in scientific research, says PM Manmohan Singh - The Times of India
