Bangalore: As Hari Krishna walks down the gravel path at the sprawling Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, he discusses his research plans—he will complete his PhD next year, searching for new compounds in liquid crystal; go abroad for a postdoctoral programme; and work for a few years there before considering a return to India.
This pretty much represents how most young researchers think on Indian campuses.
“There’s no postdoc culture here, nor is there emphasis on getting quality (PhDs) and large number of PhDs,” says Gangan Prathap, vice-chancellor of the Cochin University of Science and Technology, lamenting the low per capita investment in research. “We suffer from the tyranny of low expectations (in research),” he adds, referring to the overall quality and quantity of research output in the country.
Data from different sources indicates this. According to the Human Development Report 2007-08, India has 119 researchers per million of population, as compared with 1,564 in China, 2,706 in the UK, 4,605 in the US and 6,807 in Iceland. Even in terms of the number of researchers per 1,000 people employed, India, with 24 researchers, ranks below China (115), Japan (131), the US (324) and the EU (231), according to the directorate for science, technology and industry, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which, however, admits that the share of non-OECD countries in global R&D spending is increasing.
In terms of publications, comparison with China is inevitable, and rightly so, as the Asian giant was way behind India in research until the 1980s, but has improved dramatically to become the second largest investor in R&D globally.
China outperforms India in citations across all major technical categories. “The Chinese are not only publishing substantially more than India, but they are publishing in higher Impact Factor (a proxy metric for quality) journals as well,” according to a November 2007 report in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change (TFSC) authored by researchers from the US Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC.
One of the reasons for this decline is a fall in number of Indian journals from the international ranking. “During 1980s, India had about 40 journals which were ranked by the international Science Citation Index, but now the number has fallen to 10-12,” says Sujit Bhattacharya, one of the authors of the TFSC report, and a visiting professor at the Centre for Studies in Science Policy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.