KOCHI: The outlay for Research and Development in the 12th Five Year Plan had brought smiles to the faces of many in the scientific community. The Prime Minister had announced a 100 per cent increase in the spending on R&D, from the current 0.9 per cent of the GDP to 2 per cent. But former ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair is not too enthusiastic about the news. The man who led his team of scientists to play a part in the discovery of water on Moon spoke to ‘Express’ about the challenges and prospects of scientific research in the country.The issue is not about lack of funding. In the last 3-4 years, about 50 per cent of the funds that were allotted for scientific development has gone unutilised, he said. There are basically two problems facing the scientific community, firstly we don’t have adequate trained manpower, and secondly the management systems in our institutions are outdated. Most of our scientific departments and institutions are headed by scientists or engineers who are not trained in administration. This causes several procedural delays and non-performance.There is an absence of good leaders at the top. When our atomic and space research organisations began, we had some of the best leadership at the top. But today, there is a dearth of talent. Due to this absence of leadership, there is no focus in our research. Many are not in the mission mode and deal with very abstract projects.This in turn, discourages new students from taking to scientific research. They do not find anything attractive or challenging in the field.The scientific research in the country must focus on applied research. It should focus on solving the basic problems in the country in the fields of food security, energy, health, sanitation, education and infrastructure. But all this needs a lot of thinking at the higher levels.Putting the weight of research funding into the hands of private parties might not be the best idea to encourage applied research. It is true that funding by private parties would focus on applied research. But many of the important research might not have immediate results.They might need funding for years together. In countries like the United States, many of the research programmes are funded by private universities, and they invest for long-term research. But here that mentality has not come up. Here the industries look at is a focus on quick fix solutions.Efforts should be made to pull in more students into basic sciences and towards research. The experiment with Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology has worked well in this regard.Under the programme, 150 students are selected from the plus-two grade and given training for the higher education free. For the 150 seats, we get as many as one lakh applications. If we have five such organisation, each with about 200 students, we will get as many as 1,000 students every year for research.It is important to reduce the wage difference between different profession. Today an IT job pays you about four to five times that of research. So we end up having, as someone said, IT coolies rather than scientists in the country. If the wage difference is reduced, students will be able to take to the job of their choice rather than be bothered about the money, he said.
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