The Centre on Friday announced a plan to create a National Research Foundation (NRF), a body that will coordinate and fund research nationwide through a novel mechanism designed to pool both intellectual resources and funds from different agencies.
Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the NRF would assimilate research grants given by various ministries independent of each other and ensure that the research ecosystem in India is strengthened with focus on thrust areas relevant to national priorities.
The NRF, she said, would seek to strengthen research in thrust areas and the basic sciences without duplication of effort and expenditure. “The funds available with all ministries will be integrated into the NRF. This would be adequately supplemented with additional funds,” Sitharaman said.
A senior science policy maker said the NRF was aimed at addressing two challenges — expanding capacity for research without compromising on quality and supporting different research areas through multiple sources of funding.
The NRF could be viewed as a mechanism for the “pooling of intellect” without compromising or diminishing the strengths of the existing funding systems, said K. Vijayraghavan, principal scientific adviser to the government.
The proposal comes along with what sections of India’s scientific community view as only moderate increases in the Centre’s budgetary support for science departments. The outlay for the department of science and technology for 2019-20 is Rs 5,580 crore, a 9 per cent increase over last year’s revised expenditure. The departments of biotechnology and scientific and industrial research have both got allocations just 7 per cent higher than last year.
The budget has allocated only Rs 124 crore for a National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber Physical Systems (NM-ICPS), a programme supported by the department of science and technology to promote research on the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence. The Union cabinet had in December 2018 approved Rs 3,660 crore for the NM-ICPS over five years.
Sections of senior scientists have at times expressed concern about government departments pursuing research projects in silos with little coordination, resulting in overlapping or duplicated efforts.
“A mechanism that pool funds from different government agencies may be a more efficient way to distribute funds than it is done today,” said Ajayaghosh Ayyappanpillai, director of the National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology.