How to reform Indian public research

Freeze budgetary allocation to national laboratories in nominal terms and allocate the annual increase to the higher education sector

In India’s R&D imperative, in an earlier column (Business Standard, 06 December, 2018) we showed that India is an outlier in global R&D, both in the proportion of national R&D done in industry (44 per cent vs a global average of 71 per cent) and in the small proportion of national R&D done within the higher education system (4 per cent vs a global average of 17 per cent). We argued that India needs to increase its investment in in-house R&D by industry by a factor of 5 (to go from 0.3 per cent of GDP to the global average