Science Policy for India

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After retiring as chairman and research director of an Indian oil company in the mid1990s, the distinguished scientist Pranab Kumar Mukhopadhyay became a technical consultant for the Indian Institute of Petroleum (IIP). The IIP, one of India's premier national laboratories, is situated at the foothills of the Himalayas, bordering the Rajaji National Park in Dehra Dun. On his visits to IIP, Mukhopadhyay would unfailingly begin his day with a morning walk through the Institute's tea gardens and the neighboring villages. By the wayside of a route that he frequented, was a small furnace that a farmer used to make jaggery from sugarcane. Mukhopadhyay, who holds a doctorate in the sciences and spent the bulk of his professional life researching hydrocarbon fuels, combustion, and energy, intuitively felt that the furnace design and efficiency could be improved. Fueled by bagasse, waste generated after sugarcane had been squeezed of its juice, the furnace had been designed and built by the farmer himself. The inquisitive and thoughtful Mukhopadhyay soon befriended the farmer and persuaded him to let IIP engineers examine the furnace. Mukhopadhyay also convinced his good friend, the director of IIP, to assign the project of examining the furnace and improving its design to a staff combustion engineer. Combustion scientists and engineers from the IIP were able to improve efficiency and design such that jaggery production went up by 20%. Almost a decade later, the improved furnace design to make jaggery and its consequent benefits to local farmers is an achievement that IIP leadership never fails to highlight in presentations to visiting politicians and administrators. This story highlights the potential for scientific research and development (R&D) in developing countries like India and vindicates the belief that India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), had in science and its transformative capabilities. Even so, the example also depicts the failure of Indian science to show relevance to Indian needs. After all, it took a visiting technical consultant to spur IIP to address a technical need in its neighboring community of thirty years. The pursuit of science for its own sake is noble and certainly worth encouraging. At the same time, a portion of scientific and technological research must address economic and social problems, particularly so for the developing world where there are competing demands for scarce resources. Leading Indian scientific agencies are acutely aware of this and one of them, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), has begun a systemic analysis of this issue through an expert committee chaired by the renowned Indian economist and policy maker, Vijay Kelkar. In the fall of 2003, the authors were invited by the Kelkar Committee to author a background paper on this subject to highlight key issues. This contribution is based on that background paper. Background: The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research The CSIR was established in the early 1940s to provide the scientific and technological underpinnings of an industrializing nation. The CSIR is India's largest scientific establishment and probably the world's largest chain of publicly funded research laboratories (Rajagopal et al., 1991). Through its network of thirty-eight research laboratories and institutes and eighty field stations and extension centers, CSIR is almost ubiquitous in India. Covering a wide spectrum of science and technology, CSIR's research laboratories are classified as discipline- and business sector-specific. The National Chemical Laboratory (Pune) and the National Physical Laboratory (New Delhi) are examples of discipline-specific laboratories, while the IPP (Dehra Dun) the Central Leather Research Institute (Chennai) and the Central Drug Research Institute (Lucknow) are examples of business sector-specific laboratories. With almost 21,000 employees, an elaborate management structure dominates CSIR, which, although federally funded, is structured as an autonomous and independent organization. …