A special issue explores the enormous potential and major challenges for research in south Asia's superpower. PDF
India is racing forward. With nearly 1.3 billion people and a steady growth rate, it is expected to become the world's most populous nation within a generation. Its gross domestic product more than tripled between 2000 and 2013, and its economy ranks third in the world in terms of purchasing power, behind only China and the United States. India's scientific production has also surged, with the number of published papers quadrupling over the same period.
But the country has far to go before it earns the status of a scientific superpower. By almost every metric — spending, number of researchers and quality of publications — India underperforms relative to developed nations and the ascendant economies to which it is most often compared, such as China and Brazil.
This week, Nature takes an unvarnished look at the challenges and opportunities for scientists in India. An infographic (page 142) assesses the country's strengths and weaknesses by comparing its research and development landscape with those of comparable countries. A News Feature (page 144) probes beneath the numbers, examining Indian successes in space, biotechnology and energy, as well as exploring bureaucracy, underfunding and other obstacles to higher education and scientific research.
Scientists have high hopes that Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan, the new secretary of the Department of Biotechnology, can help to drive change in biomedical research. He is profiled onpage 148. Ten Indian research leaders offer their suggestions for how to build their country's scientific capacity — from better funding, facilities, education and mentoring to fairer recruiting, more autonomy and a focus on local problems (page 151). Cheap and clean power will be key, say energy specialists Arunabha Ghosh and Karthik Ganesan (page 156). Only by tackling such basic issues can India hope to catch up with other rapidly advancing nations.
Indian science is a study in contrasts. With its vast population and rapidly expanding economy, the country has ramped up scientific production at an impressive rate. India started the twenty-first century well behind Russia, France, Italy and Canada in terms of yearly publications and it now leads them all by healthy margins. It is quickly closing in on Japan.
Despite those gains, India is not yet a major player in world science. Its publications generate fewer citations on average than do those of other science-focused nations, including other emerging countries such as Brazil and China. Relative to its size, India has very few scientists; many Indian-born researchers leave for positions abroad and very few foreign scientists settle in India. The country invests a scant portion of its economy in research and development (R&D), and it produces relatively few patents per capita compared with other nations.
But there are bright spots. India boasts several world-class centres for science education, particularly the highly regarded Indian Institutes of Technology. Businesses in the country are investing more in R&D, which bodes well for future innovation. And more women are participating in science, although their numbers still fall far below those of men.
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Ten Indian research leaders give their prescriptions, from better funding, facilities, mentoring and education to greater respect, fairness, autonomy and confidence.
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Sunita Narain, director-general of the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi, calls for economical waste management.
India has a huge waste problem. Untreated sewage is defiling rivers and water bodies; industrial chemicals such as cadmium and nitrates are seeping into the ground and polluting the air; and solid waste from kitchen scraps and plastic packaging is piling up in our cities. The problem requires more than management. We need innovative and realistic solutions that match our pockets and our regulatory and governance abilities.
Take sewage. Flushing excreta down toilets is expensive and resource intensive. It uses water as both the carrier and the final dumping point. This approach works in countries that have the means to build huge water-supply and retrieval infrastructures and to pay for maintenance and upgrades of technologies to manage and treat pollutants — from biological waste to toxins. It does not work in India, where there are limited funds for supplying essential services to more than one billion people. A country that is poor — but fast becoming richer and more wasteful — needs a whole new paradigm.
The key obstacle is that everyday challenges are not top priorities for research and innovation. Indian science has always been fascinated by the 'masculine' agendas of space and genetics, not reinventing the toilet.
Instead, science must meet the needs of poor people. We need to devise ways to prevent pollution rather than cleaning it up afterwards. Indian research has to be more humble, nimble and investigative. It has to learn from its poorest and most illiterate people: how they cope with scarce and diverse resources by being frugal and in tune with their environment.
India's ambition should be to become the front-runner in the race to save the planet.
Professor of chemistry, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore
India's university system is broken. The higher-education system was started by the British in 1857 with the establishment of three universities — Calcutta, Bombay and Madras — and 28 affiliated colleges. After independence in 1947 and the creation of the University Grants Commission (UGC) in 1956, the number of universities grew exponentially. Today, there are more than 600, including about 200 private ones. Of the public universities, 46 are funded by central government the rest by state governments. A few, such as the central University of Hyderabad, do world-class research.
In addition to these, to improve training in basic sciences and technology, the government established 16 Indian Institutes of Technology and 5 Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research. There are also about 40 Council of Scientific and Industrial Research laboratories engaged in applied research, along with a few premiere research institutes, including my own.
The handful of these that compete at the international level contribute the bulk of high-quality scientific research in India. But they educate a tiny fraction of our students.
Facilities and teaching at the universities that serve more than 29 million students are alarming. Most are 'chalk and talk' classrooms with poor-quality teaching laboratories, let alone research laboratories. Faculty appointments are often made on the basis of political connections, caste or bribes, and funds are misappropriated. Inbreeding results: many highly qualified young scientists refuse to take up faculty positions in these universities because of the lack of infrastructure, the hostile environment and bureaucracy.
This is a disturbing situation. India needs trained, innovative minds to meet its formidable challenges. The state and central governments should take urgent action.
The government should appoint highly qualified, broad-minded vice-chancellors, who will recruit qualified faculty members and give them state-of-the-art research facilities with no external interference. Faculty should then focus on basic research and quality teaching, and encourage regional and international collaboration networks to strengthen scientific research. The government should also create many specialized research centres in the universities (like the CNRS in France). Fixing our university system will require a complete overhaul of the UGC, changes in institutional policy and legislation. This will be difficult with the present disconnect between science and policy in a government that has cut research budgets, focused on manufacturing and dissolved its scientific advisory committee.
Professor of chemistry, University of Chicago, Illinois
To catapult India into the top five scientific nations, the country needs enabling policies that money can't buy. India has huge positives but it is hamstrung by socio-cultural issues, two of which I address here: a herd mentality and a paucity of early-stage mentorship. My ideas stem from my 15 years as a graduate student and young research-group leader in India.
Having recently moved from the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore to Chicago, Illinois, I have noticed a fundamental difference in the attitude of young US scientists from that of their Indian counterparts: their appetite for big problems. 'Going for great' is a skill acquired very early on in the West. Senior researchers spot gifted graduate students, connect them with the best scientific mentors, nurture them and ensure their visibility over decades.
In India, researchers generally start being mentored only when they show promise as young principal investigators. Thus a fresh returnee from a leading postdoctoral lab abroad suddenly becomes essentially invisible to key collaborators or contacts at home and elsewhere. This results in the returnee pursuing quality problems fragmented into smaller stories for more publications, but of lower visibility. The strategy is to edge slowly towards the big ideas. Often, these big ideas are either suddenly solved by counterparts in the West, or become outdated. A top-down, merit-based, long-term mentorship scheme — starting at the graduate-student stage — could prove transformative.
Cultivating excellence is a selective process that can be perceived as elitist. But India is trying its best to become an egalitarian society. It has some outstanding senior scientists — visionaries who care deeply about taking their nation from good to great. But their efforts are neutralized by a pedestrian majority intent on preserving the status quo.
Instead, these visionaries need to be empowered to take the tough decisions to make Indian science a meritocracy. We must take a census of researchers in all disciplines. Then, preserve scientists with research programmes of international standing, regardless of age, solely on the basis of performance during the past five years. Give them abundant support to ratchet up their programmes. Identify experienced scientists who could each nurture and mentor 5–10 emerging scientists and bring them up to an outstanding level. From such a platform, break open the moribund coteries that hold the system to ransom without themselves doing cutting-edge research. If this can be done, India will soon emerge as a scientific superpower.
I still bubble with optimism. India allows young people with the right attitude to thrive. The nation's history has many examples of the conscience of the majority successfully rejecting deeply embedded socio-cultural mindsets.
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The daily delivery of drinking water causes frenzy in Delhi.
Professor of economics, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
The energy sector will drive India's economic growth for the next three decades. Better access to electricity and cleaner fuel sources will enhance the population's health and well-being and boost industry. But the country faces major challenges, from implementing technologies on the ground to staying within global carbon-emissions limits while ensuring energy access for all.
The discussion so far is one-sided. In India, energy is seen mainly as a science-and-technology issue. There is money for developing microgrids and distributed power devices. But no serious research is being funded to examine the socio-economic impacts and influences.
How will distributed generation affect energy prices and social dynamics? What will happen when new actors such as suppliers of low-carbon energy and 'producer–consumers' enter the fray? Is there an optimum path — environmentally, socially and economically — for depleting natural resources?
India needs more energy economists. Energy has long been seen as an unfashionable topic in the country's universities, and few researchers specialize in the field compared with agriculture, trade, finance and the environment. India must create a forum of energy economists who can discuss and compare the models used to develop energy strategies and influence policy dialogues while understanding local nuances.
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India is diverse, and political contexts matter. The energy sector, which meets basic service needs, is susceptible to partisan politics. But scientists have become distanced from policy-makers. Economists need to fill the gap by analysing which governance structures and regional cooperations might emerge under different energy-distribution scenarios and technological options.
A strategy to train the next generation of Indian energy economists could follow the model of the capacity-building programme for environmental economists, which ran from 1998 to 2003 through many participating universities and institutes, funded by the World Bank in collaboration with the then Ministry of Environment and Forests. Similar efforts are now being made by SANDEE, the South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics. Academics from around the world helped to train faculties in environmental economics, library content was improved, and grants and fellowships were offered so that Indian researchers could train overseas and build case studies in India.
Today, almost all universities in India have a well-defined, internationally comparable syllabus in environmental economics that is taught by well-trained teachers to plenty of students. It is now mandatory that an environmental economist be a member of each state's environmental impact assessment board. A similar approach for energy economics, starting with interested institutes, would encourage more researchers to seek solutions to India's energy problems.
Professor of ecology, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; and president, Indian National Science Academy
Indian science suffers, today more than ever, from government apathy. This is exacerbated by the fact that India tries to run on the same track as the most developed countries and the best endowed institutes in the world. Only a handful of scientists and institutions in India can afford it, and then only by sequestering an unfair share of the country's scant funds. Even these players barely compete with their chosen peers — never really at the top, but in the 'also ran' category at best. This leaves most researchers and institutions with inadequate resources, and worse, feeling backward.
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A man cleans oil barrels for recycling in Dharavi, one of Mumbai's largest and oldest slums.
This is not the only model for success. If you cannot compete on the same track, you should try a different one. India should celebrate and encourage scientists who create their own research questions long before others make the topics fashionable, or those who bring different perspectives to existing problems. Most importantly, we should garland those who work on problems that are crucial to local contexts — even if they are of little interest to elite overseas universities or to 'high-impact' journals. Examples include endemic communicable diseases, groundwater contamination and traditional methods of biodiversity conservation.
India's systems for peer review, grants, publications, jobs, awards and fellowships punish any potential future leaders in such 'unsexy' fields. Instead, the country should develop new scientific ethics and etiquette. The research community should value, for instance, collaboration with small neighbouring colleges or universities instead of recognizing only international alliances. India should create a new peer-review system, a new ranking of journals and new measures of impact — all tailor-made for our needs, problems, diseases, natural resources and educational system. We need to believe in ourselves and not just chase world rankings — as individuals, as institutions and as a country. The enemy is within. So is the solution.
Director, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal
India produces around 9,000 PhD graduates a year in science and technology. This number sounds large, but for a population of about 1.3 billion it is not: the United States produces four times as many from a population one-quarter of the size. Moreover, the variation in quality of Indian PhD graduates and faculty members is a prime concern.
For India to be at the forefront of science and technology we need better governance systems for universities, institutes and research labs. We need more capable academics to provide leadership, nurture young talent and establish a superior research enterprise.
Indian universities are mired in bureaucracy. Archaic ordinances and rules set by the University Grants Commission have stifled the spirit of academic excellence and hampered institutions' flexibility. A lack of passionate leadership coupled with poor funding has blunted their edge.
Leading the way are premier government-funded centres such as the 16 Indian Institutes of Technology, the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai, and the 5 Indian Institutes for Science Education and Research. These have one academic director, who reports to a board of governors of eminent academics, researchers and industrialists. An effective leader — with excellent research and administration skills — can cut through bureaucracy. Other public universities should similarly be made autonomous.
Centrally funded laboratories, tasked with industrially relevant research, should be run along similar lines and integrated with nearby universities and institutes. This would strengthen applied and interdisciplinary research.
In 2009, the Science Engineering Research Board was created to make government science funding quicker and fairer. Its performance now needs to be benchmarked against overseas granting agencies such as the US National Science Foundation.
Quality-control mechanisms must be established for the national accreditation and assessment of Indian PhDs and to improve research and educational training. Doctoral fellowships and research funds should be created in areas of national priority, including food security, energy and the environment. It is high time that India fixed its tertiary education system.
Professor and chairman, Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore
Is there a dearth of talent in India? Certainly not. Is there a dearth of unstoppable achievers and innovators? Yes: because making talent shine takes a culture that is proud of its scientists and a charged intellectual environment that nurtures, mentors and drives them. The efforts made by a handful of educational institutions, academies and a few others are crucial — but inadequate. We must halt the deterioration in higher-education standards in hundreds of universities, which train and produce huge numbers of science undergraduates and graduates.
Science graduates are deprived of meaningful practical training because of poor funding, government interference, inappropriately recruited faculty members and a lack of laboratory facilities in most of these centres of learning. At this crucial stage in their careers, students are missing out on the mentoring required to instil the culture of science and the habit of analytical thinking and questioning. And once scientists are trained? They work with inadequate, ill-maintained equipment, and in isolation from stimulating peers, being so few in number and so geographically dispersed.
It is imperative that the universities that produce the largest numbers of science graduates are revived so as to be capable of contemporary research. The process can be difficult and slow, or expensive and experimental. One such experiment would be to fund science generously. Another related one would be to pay researchers enough to make science a socially acceptable profession.
Meanwhile, the resilient among us must continue by jugaad — the characteristically Indian technique of making do — to try to maintain the scientific base that exists. If only the management of science were left to scientists, India could put its research on the world map — just as it put the Mangalyaan probe into orbit around Mars.
Director, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune
Historically in the Indian education system, faculty members who teach undergraduates do not do research, and those involved in research (in national laboratories and universities) do not teach undergrads. This is the opposite of the conventional Western university system.
To inject research-led undergraduate teaching, five Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs) were set up between 2006 and 2008, in Pune, Kolkata, Mohali, Bhopal and Thiruvananthapuram; the sixth one is being established this year in Tirupati. At the IISERs, students are exposed to research early in their careers, in state-of-the-art labs. Customized curricula connect theory taught in the classroom with lab experiments. Courses in social sciences, ethics and science communication round out the education.
This alliance of education and research catapulted the IISERs to fourth place in India in the 2014 Nature Index, which ranks institutes' outputs — no mean feat for institutes less than a decade old. Together, the IISERs now have 350 faculty members and 3,500 students and will reach their final capacities (2,000 students and 200 faculty members per institute) by 2019.
However, Indian research institutes still fare poorly in global rankings in terms of publication quality. They must try to attract international visiting faculty members and research students, and establish good ties with industry. More than 60% of the 600 students who have already graduated from the IISER system have secured PhD positions in leading universities abroad.
This sort of brain drain is why the Indian system is seriously afflicted by a lack of postdoctoral fellows, who are the engine of the research enterprise elsewhere. Even the best professors in India depend mainly on PhD students for their research. The government's proposed fellowship plan to send Indian PhD holders abroad to gain experience and training in emerging areas should be converted to a programme that 'twins' Indian institutions with foreign research centres, with candidates spending half their time in India. Fellowships could also be opened to foreign nationals wishing to work in India. To assure career progression, these should dovetail into existing tenure-track systems — such as the INSPIRE Faculty Scheme, the University Grants Commission Faculty Recharge Programme and the Ramanujan and Ramalingaswami fellowships.
To retain or attract back our best young scientists, and entice industry investments, India must create advanced research facilities and assured and scalable research funding, and must foster supportive mentors and visionary institutional leaders. To realize all this, the highest-achieving institutions must be granted immunity from general budget cuts and endowed with 20–30% more in funding for the next ten years, in autonomously controlled budgets. Germany's Max Planck Institutes provide an ideal governing model.
This year has seen cuts in the proportion of gross domestic product spent on science and technology, from an already low starting point of 0.9%. This risks not only undoing the progress achieved, but also doing irreversible damage. At the same time, many important scientific agencies including the Department of Science and Technology (until recently), the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the Indian Council of Medical Research and several national laboratories have been without chiefs for more than a year, which has stalled strategic decision-making and dented morale.
In the absence of the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, there is no channel for enlightening the government on the crucial role that scientists could have in addressing India's growing challenges in energy, health, environment, water and education. The country's science academies must build such a bridge. India has a vast supply of talented young people; it is our duty to nurture and harness their talent for a better tomorrow.
Professor of civil engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore
India is facing an imminent water crisis. Almost 100 million people have no access to safe drinking water, and most others experience regular shortages. More than one-third of the roughly 400 rivers that are monitored by the government are polluted.
Groundwater levels are alarmingly low in many areas, owing to overexploitation for irrigation and domestic supply. An estimated 60% of groundwater sources will be degraded in two decades. Cities consume vast amounts of energy to pump water over long distances from rivers and reservoirs, and unplanned urban growth is blocking drainage channels, causing flooding. Climate change will make matters worse. Water availability, demand and quality, as well as floods, droughts and salinity intrusion, will be affected.
But across India, hydrological research is hindered by a lack of access to good-quality data. The government bodies that are custodians of hydrological, meteorological, environmental and agricultural data are reluctant to share information openly. Combined with bureaucratic hurdles, this means that Indian researchers must either use poor-quality data or turn to US or European records.
To strengthen hydrological research and promote scientific decisions on water policy, the government must upgrade its data-collection, monitoring, communication and storage networks, in terms of both technology and density. The government's Water Resources Information System is an excellent start. Now it needs to provide real-time data on stream flow, soil moisture, groundwater levels and evapotranspiration.
'Critical zone observatories' that measure atmospheric, hydrological, biogeochemical, ecological and other fluxes in Earth's near-surface zone should be set up in each of India's seven hydro-climatic regions and integrated with others globally. Observatories should span different types of climate, terrain, demography, land use and land cover.
India needs multidisciplinary centres of excellence to address big questions — on water-system response rates to climate change, coupled forecasting of intense precipitation and floods, medium-range weather forecasts for agricultural water management and water contamination. These centres would also train the next generation of researchers to use holistic approaches. The Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has established such a centre this year. This step should be emulated nationwide with funding from government and private industry.
Senior professor, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai
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Naba Mondal, director of the India-based Neutrino Observatory project.
India has an illustrious history in high-energy physics. But two factors make me worry that it will struggle to maintain its position: a shortage of instrument builders and the difficulty of getting planning permission for big facilities.
Technological advances lie behind breakthroughs in particle physics. Indian scientists' enthusiasm and skill for building particle detectors put them at the forefront of the field early on. In the 1950s and 1960s, Indian physicists pioneered experiments with cosmic rays, and developed cloud chambers for use at high altitude. The first published detection of atmospheric neutrinos was made in 1965 with an instrument installed in a mine at Kolar Gold Fields (KGF) in Karnataka state. The first dedicated experiment to study proton decay was carried out at KGF in the early 1980s.
Today, there is little enthusiasm among India's young researchers for building instruments. One reason is that the pay-off is years in the making: researchers lose out in terms of publications compared to peers working in the lab or doing theoretical research. They find it difficult to compete in the academic job market.
Unless we devise metrics that recognize instrument development and retain these skills, it will be difficult to host high-energy-physics experiments in India. India's participation in international projects will be limited to data analysis, making us unequal partners.
Another obstacle is the slow and complex approval procedures for large experimental programmes in India. This is compounded by widespread opposition to large-scale projects by political opportunists and activists on flimsy grounds. In a healthy democracy, meaningful debates are welcome. In India, they are increasingly becoming indiscriminate and adversarial.
For example, controversy has broken out over the proposed India-based Neutrino Observatory, an underground lab in Tamil Nadu for research on neutrinos and related particle physics. The project, of which I am director, received government approval in December 2014. To stay globally competitive, it needs to be up and running by 2020. But we are far from breaking ground. By spreading fictitious fears about neutrinos, a small local political party and a handful of activists have sowed doubts in the minds of local people and made it extremely hard for us to get the required planning permissions.
Unless scientists speak up collectively, it will be prohibitively difficult to develop major science infrastructure in India.
India: The fight to become a science superpower
Despite great strides in some areas of research and development, the nation still has a long way to go.
13 May 2015
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India is one of the leading nations in wind power and it has ambitious goals for increasing solar power over the next decade.
With her jeans, T-shirt and spirited attitude, Tapasya Srivastava could pass for a student as she works in her brightly lit cancer-biology lab on the University of Delhi South Campus. Srivastava, who oversees a team of eight researchers, is thrilled that she earned “a small research space of my own” in 2010, while still in her thirties. “With a decent list of publications under my belt, I am one of the few who have studied and undergone training entirely in India,” she says.
Eight kilometres away, in the chemical-engineering department of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Shalini Gupta's team is developing sensors to detect early-stage sepsis and typhoid. Gupta did her doctorate in the United States but returned to India to focus on its needs: “I am more connected to society and its challenges,” she says.
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T V Padma discusses the biggest wins in Indian science — and its major challenges
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Srivastava and Gupta are part of a wave of young Indian scientists convinced that they can do high-quality research at home rather than having to move abroad. Such optimism reaches all the way to the top: in January, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told an assembly of scientists to “dream, imagine and explore. You will have no better supporter than me.”
India has much to be proud of. Last year, it became the first to reach Mars on its initial attempt. It boasts a thriving pharmaceutical industry that produces low-cost medications that are desperately needed by the developing world. And in his first year in office, Modi launched an ambitious plan to make India a leader in solar power.
Such successes cannot hide the huge challenges facing this country of 1.3 billion people, which leads the world in tuberculosis incidence and maternal deaths, and lacks electricity for one-quarter of its citizens. India is expected to become the world's most populous nation within a generation, and it will require a robust science and technology sector to supply the needed energy, food, health care, jobs and growth. Yet researchers in India and abroad say that the country has a relatively weak foundation in science and engineering.
Indian research is hampered by stifling bureaucracy, poor-quality education at most universities and insufficient funding. Successive governments have pledged to increase support for research and development to 2% of India's gross domestic product (GDP), but it has remained static at less than 0.9% of GDP since 2005. Despite its huge size, India has a relatively tiny number of researchers, and many of its budding scientists leave for other countries, never to return. Only by tackling its systemic problems can India compete with other emerging powerhouses such as Brazil and China.
“The density of scientists and engineers in India is one of the lowest in the world,” says Sunil Mani, an economist at the Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum, who is assessing Indian science and engineering for an upcoming report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. “There are very many important areas where we are not able to do research.”
Space to grow
In one of the cleanest rooms in India, Mylswamy Annadurai is busy conducting fitness tests on a 750-kilogram patient — a gleaming satellite called ASTROSAT. The probe is strapped to a table, where it is being shaken at six times the strength of gravity to simulate the intense forces of lift-off. ASTROSAT must also pass tests in extreme high and low temperatures and vacuum conditions, followed by checks on its solar arrays and antennas. If all goes well, the satellite will blast into orbit by September, armed with two telescopes and four other instruments to study both nearby and distant stars.
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Annadurai, who is head of the satellite centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in Bangalore, says that ASTROSAT will be India's “first full-fledged science mission” in space. It will carry instruments ten times heavier than those on India's first mission to the Moon, 2008's Chandrayaan-1, and its 2014 Mars Orbiter Mission, nicknamed Mangalyaan.
With its run of recent accomplishments, India has earned international acclaim for its ambitious space programme, which includes launch vehicles, communication satellites and one of the world's largest constellation of remote sensing satellites, as well as its science missions. Since ISRO was founded in 1969, the government has invested heavily in it, and even established a dedicated university in 2007 to train personnel. “The ISRO technical test, assembly and launch facilities are first class,” says Paul Spudis, senior staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, who was the principal investigator for one of Chandrayaan-1's experiments.
Chandrayaan-1 carried an orbiter and a 35-kilogram probe that took images as it smashed into the Moon at high speed. ISRO plans to follow it in 2017 with Chandrayaan-2, which will gently set down a lander and a six-wheeled rover; together with an orbiter, they will study the composition of the Moon's surface. Up next after that is the Aditya mission to study the Sun's corona, in 2018.
Spudis is critical of last year's Mars mission, calling it “largely irrelevant” and saying that it would have been better to return quickly to the moon. ISRO, he says, “seems to lack a strategic vision of what it wants to accomplish in space”. But the agency counters that it is pursuing several missions in parallel; the Mars mission just proceeded faster than Chandrayaan-2.
And the success in reaching Mars has convinced others at ISRO that they can carry out world-class space-science missions, says Annadurai. “The Mars mission experience has once again strengthened our belief that we can.”
Biotech bonanza
In Genome Valley, a biotechnology park in Hyderabad, entrepreneur Krishna Ella is confounding expectations. Ella returned home from the United States in 1996 with a 12-metre shipping container filled with vaccine-making equipment to support his grand plan of producing a US$1 vaccine for hepatitis B. That goal, which would make his vaccine at least an order of magnitude cheaper than the available one, struck investors as crazy, he says. But within three years, Ella's company Bharat Biotech International Limited (BBIL) succeeded in producing the Revac-B+ hepatitis vaccine at $3 a dose, which has since dropped to 30 cents per dose. It went on to develop vaccines against Japanese encephalitis, rabies, haemophilus influenza virus B and, most recently, rotavirus. Each costs barely a dollar per dose.
Affordable medicines are the cornerstone of India's health-care sector, where publicly funded hospitals struggle to provide treatment. The country has long battled infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria and dengue, but is now facing rising numbers of non-communicable illnesses, including diabetes and coronary heart disease. A 2014 report from the World Economic Forum and Harvard School of Public Health estimates that non-communicable diseases and mental illness could cost India $4.58 trillion by 2030.
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Low-price vaccines and generic drugs have helped India to carve out a niche in the international pharmaceutical industry. The global medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (also known as Doctors Without Borders), which relies on Indian generics for 80% of its anti-HIV drugs, hails the country as the “pharmacy of the developing world”. Other international organizations, including the UN children's charity UNICEF and the Global Fund to Fight AIDs, Tuberculosis and Malaria, routinely use Indian vaccines and generic drugs to treat infectious diseases (see Nature 468, 143; 2010).
But India is battling criticism over the quality of some of its pharmaceuticals. In 2012, for example, the World Health Organization took BBIL's hepatitis B vaccine and oral polio vaccine off the list of drugs preapproved for use by the UN. Ella says that the issues related to documentation submission and that they have since been sorted out. The vaccines are now back on the list.
In 2014, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent warning letters to seven Indian firms over various concerns relating to pharmaceutical production there. An FDA spokesperson toldNature: “While some Indian companies meet US product quality standards, others have been found to lack sufficient controls and systems to assure drug quality, both of finished product and active ingredients.” The FDA has an India office to work closely with Indian drug regulators to solve those problems.
And some in the biotech sector warn that India has a long way to go to create a thriving enterprise in developing new drugs. The country's success in the generics industry relies on a different set of skills: reverse-engineering pharmaceuticals created elsewhere by breaking them into their components and remaking them through cheaper routes.
“The challenge for the sector will be to graduate from reverse engineering to new-drug discovery,” says Pallu Reddanna, a biotechnologist at the University of Hyderabad. “There is need for incentives and promotion of academy–industry interactions.”
The government and private sector are trying to jump-start such efforts by setting up incubators that help transfer university and lab know-how to industry, and provide infrastructure and financial support to start-ups. Such incubators are the “greatest changer in the drug-discovery sector in India”, says P. Yogeeswari, a chemist at the Hyderabad campus of Birla Institute of Technology and Science.
Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan, secretary of the government's Department of Biotechnology, commends “incredible growth” in India's biotech entrepreneurship — despite the lack of big drug companies and the relatively low domestic investment in drug discovery. International and industry collaborations with academia are helping to advance the sector, he says (see page 148).
In 2013, the department started two major projects seeking drugs for drug-resistant tuberculosis and chronic disorders such as heart disease. In early leads, scientists have zeroed in on some human proteins that are crucial for the survival of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis strains. Proof-of-concept studies in mice have demonstrated that targeting such host proteins could help to kill the drug-resistant strains, says VijayRaghavan (S. Jayaswal et al. PLoS Pathog. 6, e1000839; 2010). “We are at an exciting early applied stage,” he says.
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Graduates celebrate at the University of Delhi, a top institution. The majority of science students in India graduate from lower-quality universities that lack funding.
Power hungry
Nearly 2,000 kilometres north of Genome Valley, 9.7 hectares of solar panels cover a building in Punjab state, generating 7.5 megawatts of electricity. This project is India's largest roof-top solar installation that is connected to an electrical power grid, and it signals India's outsize ambitions in renewable energy.
Coal supplies two-thirds of the electricity in India and will remain king for some time. But the government has set aggressive goals for installing solar-energy capacity. In 2014, Modi's government announced that it would develop 100 gigawatts of solar-energy capacity by 2022. This is a huge leap from the existing 3.7 gigawatts of solar capacity — just 1.4% of India's total electricity generation today.
“India is one of the most attractive markets in the world,” says Pashupathy Gopalan, Asia Pacific head of SunEdison, a global solar-energy company based in Maryland Heights, Missouri, which is joining Adani Enterprises of Ahmedabad to build India's largest solar-panel-manufacturing facility. “We are entering a new era where solar electricity is competitive and has achieved 'socket parity' with other sources of energy in India.”
There are other big international collaborations. The Solar Energy Research Institute for India and the United States was established in 2012 to target emerging research areas. In one project, researchers are trying to generate solar thermal power by using sunlight to heat up a highly compressed fluid form of carbon dioxide so that it turns electricity-generating turbines. This could be used in much smaller plants than conventional steam-driven turbines.
But some analysts say that India suffers from “gigawatt obsession”. The focus on giant solar plants comes at the expense of smaller facilities that do not require large parcels of land, but could provide electricity to isolated towns, even without being connected to the grid.
“The gigawatt rush must pay attention to the pace with which the capacity is to be built in India,” says Satish Agnihotri, former secretary of India's Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. Plans to build large plants could run into opposition in densely populated or heavily farmed areas, and in remote areas it can be difficult to hook gigawatt projects up to the electrical system.
News and debates about the government's current focus on solar power have overshadowed past successes in wind energy. India has more than 23 gigawatts of installed wind-power capacity, which puts it roughly even with Spain as the world's fourth biggest producer. And Mumbai-based Suzlon is the world's seventh-largest turbine manufacturer.
India has been able to develop its wind power in part because of long-term government policies and financial incentives, as well as a growing interest from independent power producers and financiers, says Shantanu Jaiswal, lead analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance in New Delhi. But some of the concerns about solar power also hamper wind projects, which face difficulty acquiring land, encounter lengthy permitting processes and often have trouble connecting to the electrical power grid.
Education outlook
Back on her leafy campus in Delhi, Srivastava and her fellow young faculty members are less concerned about big national projects than about producing their own high-quality research. They are lucky, they acknowledge, to work in one of India's top federally funded universities, which has superior faculty members and equipment.
Others are not so fortunate. India has some 700 universities of varying quality, from the elite institutions funded by the central government to more than 300 state universities and about 200 private ones. “The landscape of science education is uneven,” says Sri Krishna Joshi, former director-general of India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and former chair of the advisory committee of the University Grants Commission, which funds and oversees university education in India.
“We are caught in a vicious circle of mediocrity.”
In the top institutions, he says, “science students are doing world-class research, publishing in leading journals and boosting the global reputation of our country”. National scientific research institutes and leading universities have all contributed to India's growing strengths in research: the country's output of scientific publications quadrupled between 2000 and 2013.
Even so, India is not keeping pace with some other emerging nations, which have increased their scientific output more quickly (see page 142). And the advances in India's global science metrics mask some signs of declining quality in university science education, especially at the cash-starved universities funded by state governments that account for the majority of India's science undergraduates, says Joshi. Publicly supported universities depend on the Ministry of Human Resource Development for funds, and the higher-education budget was hit by a 3% cut in the 2014–15 budget cycle.
“Lack of even bare, minimal and sustainable funds for teaching, let alone research, has seriously plagued the quality and standards of science education,” says Krishna Ganesh, a chemist and director of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune, one of five top universities set up in India since 2006.
Many students at state universities are receiving a substandard education, says Joshi. “Here, there are no good science teachers, no good Indian textbooks, and most of the science laboratories are poorly equipped,” he says.
“We are caught in a vicious circle of mediocrity,” says geneticist Deepak Pental, former vice-chancellor of the University of Delhi.
Most analysts are concerned over the plight of science departments in state universities. At the University of Calcutta, for example, even procuring a laptop involves endless red tape, says physicist Amitava Raychaudhuri. At some other institutions, support from funding agencies helps to purchase equipment, but there is a shortage of qualified faculty members to train the students.
Beyond questions of quality, the quantity of available university spots is a persistent problem. India has gone through a university building boom, but there still is a huge shortage of slots for students (see Nature 472, 24–26; 2011).
“There is a rise in the number of students going for higher education in India, which reflects the rising aspirations of its society. But this rise should be matched by better infrastructure and financial support,” says Joshi.
Research investments
Investments in science have also dragged. India's research intensity — the share of its gross domestic product devoted to research and development (GERD) — remains lower than those of many other nations, including Brazil and Russia. Twenty years ago, India's GERD exceeded China's. Now, it is less than half.
But those numbers do not tell the whole story, says Ashutosh Sharma, secretary of the government's Department of Science and Technology — one of India's largest research-funding agencies. “The total funding is, perhaps, not as poor as it seems in terms of absolute numbers, because the number of full-time scientists doing research is also low.”
India averages about 4 full-time researchers per 10,000 people in the labour force, whereas China boasts 18 and nations with advanced science and technology sectors have around 80. “India spends about $150,000 per scientist per year, which is probably not too far from the optimal levels,” says Sharma.
India's notorious bureaucracy deserves part of the blame for the problems afflicting science education and research. The administrators of several state universities are political appointees rather than leading academics. “Often the appointed person has never been exposed to a good university in India or abroad,” says Kizhakeyil Sebastian, chair of the science-education panel of the Indian Academy of Sciences in Bangalore.
“There is over-bureaucratization within the universities and their controlling bodies,” says Pental. It often takes two years to recruit an academic after announcing an open post, which means that the best applicants can slip away, says Raychaudhuri.
The governmental quagmire has begun to affect some elite national research institutes, too. Of the 38 national laboratories that are part of the CSIR, only 25 have full-time directors. The rest are making do with acting directors, or temporary arrangements.
Even the CSIR headquarters in New Delhi has been without a full-time leader since January 2014. Interim director-general Madhukar Garg says that “the current situation is indeed challenging. CSIR is the backbone of scientific and technological research in the country. In case the prevailing scenario continues, it will affect the national innovation system as a whole.”
Sharma acknowledges that red tape is “all-pervasive”, but he says that the challenges are not bogging down Indian science. “In terms of output indicators such as the number of papers per dollar spent, Indian science is among the very top performers in the world,” he says.
And there are some signs that India might be slowing its debilitating brain drain. Although the vast majority of Indians who obtain science doctorates in the United States remain there for at least 5 years after graduation, the proportion has declined: from 89% in 2001 to 82% in 2011, the most recent year for which data are available.
Kaustuv Datta, a geneticist at Delhi University South Campus, is one of those who returned. Datta may “hate the red-tapism” at universities in India, but he still prefers doing research back home. “My parents are here, in India. And academics have a strong, positive influence on the next generation of students,” says Datta. “I wanted to make that contribution in India”.
Nature
521,
144–147
(14 May 2015)
Policy: Rethink India's energy strategy
13 May 2015
Address the needs of poor and rural households, target subsidies and support low-carbon industries, urge Arunabha Ghosh and Karthik Ganesan.
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Kamla Devi, Rajasthan's first female solar engineer.
India's policy-makers have three big energy goals: providing everyone with access to energy, securing energy supply and trying to limit carbon emissions without encumbering the nation's growth. These important concerns miss the point.
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Energy access cannot be assured by progress towards a simple target such as supplying power 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, nationwide. India has deep divides in the quantity and quality of energy consumed across income groups and between rural and urban households. Fuel subsidies are poorly designed and the strategies to reduce them to enhance energy security are heavy-handed. And because of limited action by the world's largest emitters, there is little left in the global carbon budget before planetary safety limits are breached. Clean energy and alternative growth is imperative.
India's energy priorities should be reframed as follows: to cater to the different energy demands of citizens of various economic strata; to direct energy subsidies to benefit the poor; and to promote low-carbon industry.
Disparate demand
Urban India aspires to have a reliable 24/7 electricity supply — voltages currently drop at peak demand times such as during evenings. Meanwhile, more than one-third of India's households, mostly poor and rural, are not connected to the electricity grid. For those that are, blackouts last 4–16 hours a day. The poorest households consume one-quarter of the energy of those at the highest income levels. Urban centres are in effect subsidised by rural areas, which are being overcharged for substandard service1. The poorest households pay 30% more per unit of useful energy than the richest2.
One solution to these disparate demands is to deliver more electricity through the grid while adopting cleaner energy sources. The Indian government has announced ambitious plans for renewable energy: up to 175 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity by 2022. There are many challenges to achieving this target, from the availability of resource data on which to base decisions and managing risks to the high cost and the huge variability across the grid in terms of energy sources and infrastructure.
Nature special:Science in India
Meanwhile, the promise of reliable electricity through centralized infrastructure and systems remains unfulfilled. This is in part because most electricity utilities suffer financial difficulties — they lost more than US$19 billion in 2012–13 (ref. 3). One solution is to tap smaller-scale distributed renewable energy sources, primarily solar, biomass and small-scale hydropower. Off-grid power based on these technologies has advantages such as network resilience, flexibility and environmental and health benefits4.
More than one million households in India rely on solar off-grid systems for lighting. A further 20 GW of energy capacity could be achieved if 15% of irrigation pumps were converted to solar energy. Renewable-energy applications can provide heating, cooling, cooking and mechanical power as well as electricity5.
More than 250 companies across India, with long supply chains and networks of village-level entrepreneurs, operate in the decentralized clean-energy sector already. They demonstrate that putting power in the hands of poor people can begin a transformation in how energy access is understood and delivered. At the same time, such rapid growth and geographical spread could result in variable quality of service and expensive energy for poor people. More training would help to keep up standards.
The challenge is to balance two types of investment: those in the centralized grid, which are key to the aspirations of millions of higher-income households, and funds for standalone systems in isolated and underserved areas or for integrating such systems to the grid.
Rational subsidies
Another reason for pursuing renewable energy in India is to avoid the pitfalls of a growth strategy mostly based on fossil fuels. Already, imports account for more than 80% of India's crude oil and 25% of its coal and gas, raising worries about supply and price volatility6. Petroleum constitutes nearly 30% of all commodity imports, leaving India little fiscal room to shrink its large current account deficit.
Source: Ref. 7
India hands out generous energy subsidies, most of which are not means-tested (see 'Energy imbalance'). For example, in 2013–14 the government gave away $8 billion worth of subsidies for liquified petroleum gas (LPG)7. Yet less than half of urban households and only 6% of rural ones exclusively use LPG for cooking. Traditional biomass fuels such as wood account for 20% of Indian households' energy use. The government must rationalize subsidies and target them better. A well-designed programme would increase access to modern cooking energy (electricity and gas) for the same budget. For instance, reducing subsidized LPG to 9 cylinders (instead of 12) per year per connection could save the government $724 million. Excluding the richest 15% of households from the subsidy could save $1.18 billion annually. The savings should be redirected to increasing the availability in rural areas of cleaner cookstoves and biogas, and could extend LPG provision to 30 million more households.
What to make in India?
Energy and climate policies are closely tied to industrial policy. Even on a low-carbon energy pathway, total primary energy consumption in India will at least double by 2030 (compared to 2011 levels). Energy efficiency alone — in industry, residential and commercial spheres — cannot mitigate climate change.
Although unemployment rates in India are low (less than 5%) nearly 35% of employment is casual labour. The government's Make in India campaign, launched in September 2014, calls for aggressive job creation through rapid growth in the industrial sector.
Manufacturing consumes nearly one-third of India's primary energy supply, and contributes to 16% of gross domestic product (GDP) and more than 20% of direct emissions8. These emissions would grow, should India achieve its target of 25% contribution to GDP from manufacturing.
The best opportunity for decarbonization, therefore, is the power sector — which contributes nearly 38% of overall emissions8. Here, renewable energy could account for about 30% of the electricity mix by 2030.
In sectors such as metal production, non-metallic minerals, chemicals and textiles, which contribute most to manufacturing GDP, fuel accounts for 9–23% of all input costs compared to the industrial-sector average of 5%. Energy efficiency and alternative fuels should play a key part in decarbonizing these sectors. India's cement industry, for instance, is one of the world's most efficient, but it also accounts for 7% of the country's emissions. Here, technological advances such as refuse-derived fuels could save 600 million tonnes of coal, 550 billion units of electricity and 3.4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions between now and 2050.
A shift to a different industrial mix is required: away from such energy-intensive sectors and towards metal fabrication, manufacture of computers and electronics, electrical and mechanical machinery, advanced materials, biotechnology, nanotechnology and photonics. This would lower the energy footprint of India's industrial growth.
Nature
521,
156–157
(14 May 2015)
doi:10.1038/521156a
Harish, S. M. & Tongia, R. Do Rural Residential Electricity Consumers Cross-Subsidise their Urban Counterparts? Exploring the Inequity in Supply in the Indian Power Sector (Brookings, 2014). Show context
Ganesan, K. & Vishnu, R. Energy Access in India — Today, and Tomorrow (Council on Energy, Environment and Water, 2014). Show context
Power Finance Corporation. The Performance of State Power Utilities for the years 2010–11 to 2012–13 (PFC, 2013); available at http://go.nature.com/io3psm Show context
Kammen, D. M., Alstone, P. & Gershenson, D. AIP Conf. Proc. 1652, 14 (2015).
WWF-India and CEEW RE+: Renewables Beyond Electricity (WWF-India and CEEW, 2013). Show context
Steven, D. & Ghosh, A. in The New Politics of Strategic Resources: Energy and Food Security Challenges in the 21st Century (eds Steven, D., O'Brien, E. & James, B.) 40–70 (Brookings, 2014). Show context
Jain, A., Agrawal, S. & Ganesan, K. Rationalising Subsidies, Reaching the Underserved: Improving Effectiveness of Domestic LPG Subsidy and Distribution in India (Council on Energy, Environment and Water, 2014). Show context
Indian Network for Climate Change Assessment. India: Greenhouse Gas Emissions 2007(Ministry of Environment and Forests, 2010). Hide context
Manufacturing consumes nearly one-third of India's primary energy supply, and contributes to 16% of gross domestic product (GDP) and more than 20% of direct emissions8… in article
The best opportunity for decarbonization, therefore, is the power sector — which contributes nearly 38% of overall emissions8… in ar
Indian bioscience: The anti-bureaucrat
K. VijayRaghavan is determined to cut through red tape and build up biological science in India.
13 May 2015
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On 12 April, Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan posted an update to his more than 2,500 Facebook friends. It announced a bold plan from India's Department of Biotechnology (DBT) — the agency that VijayRaghavan leads, and the country's largest funder of biomedical research — to establish a new marine-biology institute and research stations along India's vast coastline. Within hours, 500 people had 'liked' the post and more than 60 had left comments of congratulations.
Only one offered a critical note. A graduate student said that starting programmes is all well and good, but the DBT must hold the researchers whom it already funds accountable for the quality of their science. Shortly after, VijayRaghavan replied: “Your words are very wise and correct! Thank you. We must keep your points in mind if we are to get maximum for our Rupee and have quality science.”
It is rare for a public official to be so responsive and open to criticism, especially in a country as steeped in bureaucratic hierarchy as India, says biologist Inder Verma at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, California, who has served as a scientific adviser to the Indian government since the 1980s. Yet almost anyone who contacts VijayRaghavan by Facebook, Twitter or e-mail gets a personal response in minutes. “Vijay is a breath of fresh air,” Verma says.
Nature special:Science in India
VijayRaghavan is more than that. He is a respected fly geneticist and administrator who helped to build the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore, one of India's most prestigious institutions, from the ground up. In January 2013, he left his job as NCBS director and moved to New Delhi to lead the DBT. He says that he wants to inject rigour into Indian science and train scientists to work together on tractable problems. As grand visions go, his can seem muted, almost modest. “I'm not going to be stupid and try something completely nutty; I'm going to try something within my grasp,” he says.
Researchers are optimistic about what he might be able to achieve. “It's very rare to have a scientist of Vijay's calibre heading a government department,” says Jyotsna Dhawan, a stem-cell biologist who worked with VijayRaghavan for seven years. “So I think all of us in the scientific community have very high hopes.”
But they also recognize the challenges, which include wrangling with New Delhi's murky politics — known for ensnaring plans in red tape — and the DBT's long, painful grant-review process. In the past couple of years, the Ministry of Finance has made it difficult for the agency to honour even approved grants. And although the DBT is a major funder of extramural research, the money that it actually gets each year — a little more than 14 billion rupees (about US$225 million) — is a fraction of that commanded by analogous agencies elsewhere, such as the US National Institutes of Health.
Given the challenges, even the most ardent well-wishers are holding their applause. “It's not entirely apparent to me what an individual, even one so dynamic and forward-looking as VijayRaghavan, can do to cut through the red tape,” says Dhawan.
A passion to learn
A self-described “air-force brat”, VijayRaghavan grew up all over India, moving every few years. He was hungry for knowledge, and, as a teenager, used to cycle to his local branch of the British Council or the US Information Service — the main sources of foreign publications in those days — and read every book and magazine that he could find. “In the pre-Internet days, that was my food,” he says.
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After studying chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, VijayRaghavan was preparing to leave for a bioengineering PhD programme in Switzerland when he chanced on an article by renowned molecular biologist Obaid Siddiqi on using genetics to understand the nervous system. It was a departure from the work that VijayRaghavan had originally planned to do, but, he says, “I found the formalism of genetics easy to grasp, and that excited me very much.”
He sought out Siddiqi at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, where he began a PhD programme. It was, at the time, a place that afforded considerable freedom to its students. “You did what you pleased and you joined whomever you wanted to for your research,” VijayRaghavan says. “It was an exhilarating experience.”
But there was a growing air of complacency and nepotism at the TIFR that frustrated Siddiqi. For years, he had been planning to build a new institute, and he saw a natural ally in VijayRaghavan. The pair began to hatch plans, even as VijayRaghavan embarked on further training at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and later, undertook a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena.
Elliot Meyerowitz, VijayRaghavan's adviser at Caltech, says that lab members routinely tried to flummox foreign postdocs with US slang and customs, but they could never rattle VijayRaghavan. “I don't know whether he understood, or if he was just so cool, we didn't know he didn't understand,” Meyerowitz says. VijayRaghavan says that he did understand, thanks to his time devouring British and US magazines.
From the ground up
In 1988, VijayRaghavan left Caltech and returned to India to head a lab at the TIFR, and he, Siddiqi and a handful of other scientists laid groundwork for the research centre in Bangalore. They wanted the institute, which would be named the NCBS, to be different from any in India before it. Siddiqi became founding director, but VijayRaghavan and a few others were closely involved in its development. “We were in the trenches together — young, some very talented, all very driven,” VijayRaghavan says. “We had a sense of rebellion.”
From the start, VijayRagahvan wanted to recruit people trained in multiple disciplines who were focused on cutting-edge techniques, such as single-cell analysis, says statistician Partha Majumder. “This trait of being able to look way into the future is what sets him apart.”
Courtesy of K. VijayRaghavan and TIFR
K. VijayRaghavan (bottom right) in a class photo at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai in 1980. Obaid Siddiqi sits top left.
In 1991, VijayRaghavan moved to Bangalore to launch the NCBS's first lab. Over the next year, two more faculty members joined him. The entire centre was a “shack”, he recalls, situated on one floor of the radio-astronomy building at the Indian Institute of Science. VijayRaghavan had to cycle 1.5 kilometres to the nearest biology lab to photograph his DNA gels. “We had an absolute ball of a time,” he says.
Along with building the institute, VijayRaghavan was strengthening his scientific reputation. He borrowed equipment to set up a series of elegant genetic experiments that would enable him to write several high-profile papers defining specific events in Drosophila muscle development.
Other faculty members, such as Gaiti Hasan, M. K. Mathew and Jayant Udgaonkar, were publishing groundbreaking papers in cell signalling and protein folding, which in turn helped to entice other scientists to join the NCBS. “We made extraordinarily rash promises that we would do everything for them, which we did,” VijayRaghavan says.
In 1993, for example, VijayRaghavan learned that Satyajit Mayor, a cell biologist in New York City whom he was trying to recruit, needed a pricey Zeiss inverted microscope. VijayRaghavan had been promised some equipment for his own lab through a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York City, but stringent rules from the TIFR and the Indian government had held up the procurement for years. He changed his request to get the microscope instead.
All that Mayor knows of the negotiation is that he sent an e-mail to VijayRaghavan one night telling him that he would not be able to join the institute without that type of microscope. He woke up the next morning to VijayRaghavan's reply: “It'll be here when you arrive.” Mayor joined the NCBS about 18 months later.
United by science
VijayRaghavan took over from Siddiqi as director of the NCBS in 1996. As the institute grew, he strove to build a democratic system, in which even graduate students had a say, and criticism was not just accepted, but expected. Before moving ahead with any new plans, he always made sure that he “brought people along with him”, says Mayor, now the institute's director.
Sam Mohan/Yolk Studio
K. VijayRaghavan in his office in Bangalore.
In 1999, for example, the leaders of the institute were considering adding a master's programme in wildlife ecology and conservation. At first, only 3 or 4 of its then 22 faculty members were in favour of the idea. At a meeting, VijayRaghavan carefully listened to the pros and cons, and was ultimately able to convince everyone, recalls Mayor. “Everybody left that meeting feeling like we'd done the right thing,” he says. “The way the discussion and the dialogue and the arguments were put across, quite masterfully, was so Vijay.”
The programme has become one of the institute's most successful, with eight field stations across the country and faculty members drawn from the United States and Germany. By the time VijayRaghavan left, the NCBS was widely regarded as one of India's leading research organizations.
But the NCBS, and a few other select institutes, are exceptions in India. Much of the country's science is beset with the same problems it has had for decades — interminable waits for reagents, or a granting scheme that places a 3-year limit on funding, forcing researchers to write new applications in unrealistic cycles.
VijayRaghavan's predecessor at the DBT, Maharaj Kishan Bhan, had done much to modernize Indian research and make it more independent, including helping to develop a low-cost rotavirus vaccine and setting up an organization to support entrepreneurs. “If Bhan was not able to succeed in some places,” says Verma, it was because of limited resources and not having enough people to support his vision. “Perhaps he bit off more than he could chew — the same could happen to Vijay.”
Back to basics
Since his arrival at the DBT, VijayRaghavan has unveiled a few plans. Financially, Indian science is no match for that in the United States, Europe or China, something that he freely acknowledges. But he says that India can make big gains by capitalizing on its advantages and by collaborating with others.
His main priorities are to invest in basic research areas — such as computational biology, in which India is already strong — to break down the barriers between disciplines and to improve training for all scientists.
“I think he's got a very, very strong vision about the importance of fundamental and basic science,” says Eve Marder, a neuroscientist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, who serves alongside VijayRaghavan on the scientific advisory board for the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia.
“I think all of us in the scientific community have very high hopes.”
The DBT's marine-biology initiative exemplifies this vision. The effort, intended to chart biodiversity and identify compounds for biotechnology development, is the DBT's — and VijayRaghavan's — brainchild. But it involves the Indian Space Research Organisation in Bangalore and the Ministry of Earth Sciences in New Delhi, both first-time partners for the DBT. In addition, the French National Centre for Scientific Research and the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris will help to train Indian researchers. The project is part of VijayRaghavan's strategy to compensate for the DBT's limited budget by partnering with every ministry that has funds allotted for science and technology, including the sanitation, maternal-health and nutrition ministries.
In the next year, he plans to roll out an Indian body modelled after the European Molecular Biology Organization — a scientific society that would promote India as a hub for international collaborations and offer online training for scientists at all levels. He is also encouraging local collaboration on training and research. In the Delhi area, for example, he plans to persuade the leaders of well-established immunology, mathematics, engineering and medical institutes to work together. “Boom!” he says. “Within a few years, you're going to have extraordinary-quality people being trained, both engineers and clinicians”.
In the short term, he wants to play to India's strengths. Getting India's thriving community of mathematicians and computer scientists to work on problems in biology, for example, could help the country to gain an edge in bioinformatics and quantitative biology — fields that do not typically require as much funding as bench biology.
This is all easier said than done,VijayRaghavan admits, but he intends to use financial incentives and disincentives — what he calls “fire in the belly” and “fire in the rear” — to make it happen.
In the past, the DBT has set out strict budgetary allocations at the beginning of each year, and had little flexibility in later months. But last year, VijayRaghavan set aside a pot of about $33 million from the DBT's annual budget. The money can be used to respond to innovative ideas, reviewed by international experts. This is sure to aggravate some institutes that are used to being well-funded, but VijayRaghavan is unmoved. “It's about time that we recognize excellence and recognize shoddiness,” he says.
VijayRaghavan is also tackling the grant-review process. He is streamlining the DBT's online application system, he has created timelines for submitting grants and has introduced the DBT's first open-access and conflict-of-interest policies.
“When people complain about problems in India, it's rather astounding how few of us are actually doing something about them,” he says. “If you actually start doing something about anything, the situation changes.”
But some colleagues have concerns. Mayor says that VijayRaghavan's desire for consensus and harmony could prove a weakness. “He is so keen to be extremely positive about everyone,” Mayor says. “When you're operating in the real world where you have to get things done, that, I would say, is a bit of a problem.”
And in a government department, VijayRaghavan will not be able to hand-pick people who share his vision, as he did at the NCBS. “I'm a little concerned that if he doesn't have that, he will burn out, because he will try to do it all himself,” Mayor says.
VijayRaghavan shows no sign of burnout yet. He still maintains a lab, albeit a lean one, conferring with his team in the evenings through Skype and returning to Bangalore every weekend. Besides the tweets and Facebook posts, he blogs and makes time to run several times a week — and, he says, he is having fun doing it all.
“I have to tell you one simple rule in any job. If you wake up for several days in a row and say, 'Why am I doing this?' then you're better off quitting,” he says. “Not only has that not happened, I'm actually quite excited when I wake up every day. I just look at the day and hit it hard.”
Nature
521,
148–150
(14 May 2015)
Policy: Free Indian science
02 April 2014
As elections begin in India, Mathai Joseph and Andrew Robinson call for an end to the stultifying bureaucracy that has held back the nation's science for decades.
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Illustration by Phil Disley
India's general elections this month and next could be among the most important since it gained independence in 1947. After ten years of a largely indecisive and an often scandal-ridden coalition government, there are strident demands for better governance, economic reform, the promotion of manufacturing and improvements in agriculture, health care and environmental management.
Sadly, science and its administration, once seen as central to Indian development, are not currently on the agenda, despite some trenchant critiques from scientists and science policy-makers1, 2. Repeated government promises to increase the expenditure on research and development (R&D) to 2% of India's gross domestic product have not been kept. R&D spend remains at about 0.9% of GDP — compared with 1.12% in Russia3 (down from 1.25% in 2009), 1.25% in Brazil and 1.84% in China2 (see 'Brick benchmarking').
That said, the stagnation afflicting Indian science is as much structural as it is financial. Before the machinery of government took over and mismanaged research in the mid-twentieth century, several foundational scientific discoveries were made in India. Between about 1900 and 1930, Jagadish Chandra Bose made innovations in wireless signalling (borrowed by Italian electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi); Meghnad Saha developed an ionization formula for hot gases that has a central role in stellar astrophysics; Satyendra Nath Bose's theoretical work in quantum statistics led to Bose–Einstein statistics; Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman did Nobel-prizewinning work on light scattering; and in mathematics, Srinivasa Ramanujan was equally pioneering.
But since 1947, there has not been a single Nobel-prizewinning scientific or technological discovery, despite India's successes in space, radio astronomy, biology and pharmaceuticals and the worldwide reputation of its US$100-billion information technology (IT) industry. Three other Indian-born scientists have won a Nobel prize — biochemist Har Gobind Khorana (in 1968), astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (in 1983) and molecular biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (in 2009) — but for work done entirely outside India. No mathematician from India has won the Fields Medal. And Indian institutes and universities do not feature in the world's top 200 higher-education institutions (see go.nature.com/bc69uq).
The basic problem is that Indian science has for too long been hamstrung by a bureaucratic mentality that values administrative power over scientific achievement. And, to preserve local control, research is still done mostly by small teams working in isolation rather than through collaboration — a key generator of impact4.
Source: Thomson Reuters
More than two decades ago, the threat of imminent national bankruptcy forced India's government to liberate its economy from the notorious 'licence–permit raj', which had strait-jacketed commerce and industry since 1947. What will it take in 2014 to reinvigorate India's decrepit scientific empires, trapped for decades in a similarly rigid bureaucracy?
Deep-rooted problem
The problem has a long history. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) was formed in 1942, before independence, to establish five national laboratories aimed at converting research discoveries into industrial applications. It was soon widely derided. Raman, referring to the first director-general of the CSIR, chemist Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, said: “Bhatnagar built the National Laboratories to bury scientific instruments”5. The situation today is no better. A former CSIR director-general, chemical engineer Raghunath Anant Mashelkar, remarked in 2013: “India can't remain a nation of imitators.”
In 1954, India's Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) was created using a different model, later replicated for other scientific departments, such as those for space, science and technology, electronics, biotechnology and ocean development. Its first head, nuclear physicist Homi J. Bhabha, was made a secretary to the government, on a par with top administrators in home affairs, finance and defence. This gave atomic energy official credibility, but placed it in a bureaucracy that was not designed to foster innovation.
Gradually, the DAE's independence was ground down and its scientists and technologists slotted into administrative grades in which they could progress no faster than their non-scientific peers. Research achievement offered few rewards, other than a patriotic pat on the back. The other scientific departments quickly went down the same route. Scientists began to measure success by their administrative position and left research to juniors, who saw what they had to do to move up the hierarchy. If good science was done along the way, it was incidental. Today, although India ranks tenth in the world for output of scientific papers, it ranks 166th for average citations per paper (see go.nature.com/xl3ldg). Almost 20% of patents filed at the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2010 were from China, with just 1.9% from India (below Russia's 2.1% but above Brazil's 1.1%)6.
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Nearly 60% of India's science budget2 is now spent on the CSIR, scientific departments and the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) — an enormous and impenetrable empire set up in 1958. None of these national institutions has stimulated scientific excellence. Indian scientists do outstanding work, but not in India. The latest examples of this long-familiar situation include the award of the 2014 Marconi Prize in the United States to engineer Arogyaswami Joseph Paulraj of Stanford University in California, who worked in the Indian navy and at the Centre for Development of Telematics for some years before emigrating in the early 1990s, and the appointment in February of Indian-born Satya Nadella as chief executive of Microsoft.
The problems at the national level are mirrored in institutions. First, scientists are promoted on the basis of years of service, rather than achievement, and once at the top they stay until retirement age; long after, in some cases. Even at the prestigious Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, which is less rule-bound than many other institutions, research groups are almost invariably headed by those who have been there the longest.
Second, although research in the leading institutions is well funded — with more money available than requested in credible grant applications, a striking contrast to the situation in many nations — the funding is subject to unsuitable restrictions applicable to the entire government bureaucracy. These include limited foreign travel and no travel support for research students, ruling out regular participation in leading conferences and research gatherings.
Third, the movement of researchers from one institution to another is discouraged, because administrators prefer senior positions to be filled by internal promotion rather than lateral hiring.
One would expect respected bodies of scientists to question the government's virtual abandonment of science. But none of India's science academies (such as the Indian National Science Academy and the Indian Academy of Sciences) has taken any action — even on the widely reported cases of plagiarism by their fellows7.
Four steps towards change
Indian science needs public funding, but not government control. In many countries, the promotion of science is devolved to agencies outside the main government structures, such as the United Kingdom's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the European Research Council, the US National Science Foundation and Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research.
“Indian science needs public funding, but not government control.”
The first step towards reinvigorating Indian science must be to create an empowered funding agency, staffed by working scientists, some of whom could be non-resident Indians. A possible model is the European Research Council, which deals with a complex of national governments no less formidable than India's 29 state governments, yet manages to focus on supporting research excellence. The crucial requirement is obviously that an Indian scientific research council be permitted to set its own criteria for the evaluation of research proposals, independent of direct government control, and disburse government funds accordingly.
A second step must be to ensure planned rotation of institutional roles and responsibilities. This occurs in most university departments in the Western world — typically, every four or five years for the chair of a UK university department. Governing bodies should limit the tenure of the heads of scientific institutions and groups to, say, five years, after which they would be expected to return to active research. This change would work best by choosing heads young enough to have future research careers. Bhabha was 35 years old when he was appointed director of the TIFR in 1944; his example has not been repeated.
Third, the formation of trans-institutional groups that can undertake coordinated work in a few well-chosen areas should be encouraged at the funding stage. This contrasts with the existing 'national missions' of the government. The $160-million Nano Mission (launched in 2007) has funded more than 150 individual projects, 11 centres of excellence and 6 industry-linked projects — but has required no collaboration between institutions. For building competence and achieving results, it would have been much more effective to encourage collaborative efforts across institutions in, for instance, medical applications, solar and fuel cells, and water purification. Such collaboration has been achieved successfully, for example, in the European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology, the projects of which span several countries and agencies.
Fourth, how to spend that 2% of GDP when it finally materializes? Leading institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and many others are already well provided for, by any standards8. New research money should be spent on regenerating the scores of poorly provided university laboratories that lack the funds to procure and maintain modern scientific equipment; they currently receive only around 10% of the R&D budget but are expected to produce most of the country's PhDs2.
Lessons from computing
Indian scientists working in conventional disciplines will be loath to admit it, but there is now a model of technological success in India — in the growth of the IT industry. The creation and export of software to the developed nations grew, even during the licence–permit raj of the 1970s and 80s, because software did not fall into any government category9. Its commercial success was driven primarily by young engineers in their 20s working in a competitive environment unfettered by government regulations.
Ironically, academic computer science in India barely benefited from this boom until recently, when a few enterprising IT companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, Microsoft and Infosys instituted well-planned funding to pay attractive stipends to young computer scientists taking up research careers.
One lesson from India's IT industry is that it is essential to draw the private sector into major research programmes. Industry at present contributes about 30% of India's total spend on R&D2, most of it devoted to improving productivity and reducing cost and energy consumption, rather than product development. It is essentially shut out of basic research because of government rules that prohibit, or severely inhibit, public–private collaboration. Although the massive public-sector defence industry relies mostly on purchasing foreign-made weapons and little on the laboratories of the DRDO, it is still unwilling to partner with Indian companies to grow competence and capability.
Another lesson is that science could attract talented young people if it provided them with a more exciting work environment and a career path that rewards achievement. A scientific career has the potential to be at least as challenging and stimulating as one in IT, even if not as financially rewarding.
The Indian pioneers of the early twentieth century, such as Raman, made their theoretical and experimental breakthroughs with almost no government support; their research suffered from government apathy but not bureaucratic interference. The strong urge for discovery that drove them could return — if there were greater rewards for innovation, fewer for administration and longevity.
The website of the Indian Department of Science and Technology proudly states that “India is one of the top-ranking countries in the field of basic research”.
It is true that India has made considerable progress in areas such as biotechnology, renewable energy and aerospace. But it is also mired in deep problems that impede innovation and are hampering the country’s progress. India has a puny scientific workforce, relatively few high-quality universities, an anaemic manufacturing sector and an epidemic of red tape. The result is that many Indian scientists head to other countries for training and jobs.
It would be easy to argue that a lack of funding is holding India back and stopping it from becoming a science superpower. The country devotes less than 1% of its gross domestic product to research and development, which puts it far behind emerging nations such as China and Brazil, as well as the established economies of the United States and Europe. But more money will not cure India’s multiple science ills, as Naturedocuments this week in a special issue on the state of research in the country (see page 141).
One of India’s biggest challenges is to boost its science to help drive national development. As a start, it must expand its research workforce. But that will require more high-quality universities and appropriate jobs for their graduates. The government is taking steps in the right direction. It has established tax incentives for research and development that are among the best in the world. These have helped to boost research investments by a few industries, but have yet to drive widespread innovation.
In tandem, India must tackle the bureaucratic morass that is impeding research and innovation. Scientists complain that funds for grants routinely arrive months late and that it can take years to fill positions. As a measure of the problem, one-third of the national laboratories, which are overseen by the prestigious Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), lack permanent leaders (seepage 144). Even the CSIR is run by a temporary director-general, Madhukar Garg, who told Naturethat if the organization continues along these lines, “it will affect the national innovation system as a whole”.
“The solution is not to silence discussion or to shrink environmental oversight.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, like his predecessors, has denounced the bureaucratic brakes holding back science, but there has been little progress here. A key to solving the issue is to elevate talented scientists who have administration experience into positions of responsibility. One example is Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan, who is profiled on page 148. He is a gifted geneticist who in 2013 took over as head of the Department of Biotechnology, the leading funder of bioscience research grants. Among other changes, he is attempting is to streamline the notoriously cumbersome grant-application process.
India could use some help. Compared with some other developing nations, it has a relatively low level of international collaboration, even with the United Kingdom, with which it shares a unique history. It bodes well that the new UK minister of universities and science, Jo Johnson, has a strong interest in India. In fact, he co-edited a book entitled Reconnecting Britain and India: Ideas for an Enhanced Partnership (Academic Foundation, 2012).
India does, however, need to look closely at the changes it is making, because not all are positive. As part of its effort to encourage development, the Modi administration has tried to silence some critics of policies on energy, climate and human rights. In April, the Indian government revoked the registrations of thousands of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that receive foreign funds, and it has frozen the assets of Greenpeace over claims that it had violated reporting rules about foreign contributions. On 6 May, the US ambassador to India, Richard Verma, warned about “the potentially chilling effects of these regulatory steps focused on NGOs”.
Some scientists might be tempted to applaud India’s clampdown on environmental groups, which have stymied certain research initiatives. In March, environmentalists held up construction of a major neutrino observatory with debatable claims that the facility would harm an aquifer. AndNaturereports this week that the Modi government has quietly moved forward with trials of genetically modified crops, which have long been desired by biotech researchers but have been impeded by environmental groups (see page 138).
But scientists in India should not cheer the government’s attempts to suppress dissent, even if it helps them to achieve their research goals. It would be wrong to blame environmental advocates for India’s lengthy and fault-ridden procedures for weighing up the impact of projects. The solution is not to silence discussion or to shrink environmental oversight. Rather, India should make strategic improvements to the environmental evaluation process that balance progress with protection.India’s budget disappoints scientists
Partha Sarkar/Xinhua Press/Corbis
India's finance minister Arun Jaitley (centre, front) presented the nation's 2015–16 budget on 28 February.
If India’s scientists had hoped that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s sweeping victory in last year’s general election heralded a step change for research funding, they have now been twice disappointed. In the country’s 2015–16 budget, announced on 28 February, funding for science remained flat in real terms, and has nosedived for some departments. That echoes similar austerity in last year’s budget, the first of Modi’s term.
India's main agency for disbursing research grants, the ministry of science and technology, received 95 billion rupees (US$1.5 billion), an 8% hike over last year’s pledged funds, and slightly above inflation. But owing to cuts in research spending in other departments, the overall allocation for science (which includes seven other ministries that undertake research: agriculture, defence, Earth sciences, health, renewable energy, space and atomic energy), stood at 419 billion rupees, 3.4% more than what was pledged last year (see 'Budget allocations').
“What we have in this budget is inflation-adjusted funds,” says Dheeraj Sanghi, a computer scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He says that Indian science departments need at least a 14–15% increase in funds each year. That would take into account the national rate of inflation, aspirations for high-quality research, and the need for more grants to fund research at the increasing number of elite centres in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) group, he says.
“I wish they had taken this opportunity to increase funding,” says C. N. R. Rao, a materials scientist at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore who was head of India's Scientific Advisory Council under the country’s previous prime minister, Manmohan Singh. “There are scientists in India who want to do cutting-edge, competitive science,” he says. “But to be competitive you need more funds.”
The funding requests came as part of an overall budget that saw little change on last year’s spending. Despite Modi’s stated aim to scale up renewable energy in India, the budget slashed the renewable-energy ministry’s funds to 3 billion rupees — down 68% compared to last year’s pledged funds, and down 45% on what was eventually allocated to the body after the government's usual mid-year budget revisions. The ministry for Earth sciences, which oversees research on climate change and meteorology, received a smaller cut of 4.6%.
Faring better were allocations for atomic-energy research and for space, which received increases of 5% and 2%, respectively. The space budget includes increased funds for Aditya-1, the country’s first satellite to study the Sun, intended to launch after 2017.
Many scientists were relieved that the science ministry's budget escaped the axe. “At least the funds for the science ministry have not been cut, as they have been for some other areas,” said Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan, secretary of the Department of Biotechnology, which sits under the science ministry. He urged researchers to seek funds through national and international collaboration, rather than depend on a direct grant from the Indian government.
Finance minister Arun Jaitely announced cash for two more IIT centres and five more medical schools in the All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) system. Sanghi says that India should be increasing the number of IITs gradually, instead of the spurt of eight new centres over the past decade. “It has been difficult to manage the sudden increase in faculty and students at IITs,” he says. Rao says that a budget line that adds more institutes has little meaning in practice. “Some of the new IITs are still not functional,” he says.
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