India is booming — but there are worries ahead for basic science

Some 970 million people in India will head to the ballot box starting on 19 April in a general election that polls predict will see Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), win a third five-year term. Many scientists in India are hopeful that the next five years could bring greater spending on applied science. But some have also expressed concerns. Among these are that funding is not increasing in line with India’s booming economy, and that the government’s top-down control of science, as some researchers see it, allows them little say in how money is allocated.

More money

Modi first became India’s prime minister in 2014. Since then, the total pot of money for research and development has increased. But relative to India’s gross domestic product (GDP), spending on R&D dropped from 0.71% in 2014–15 to 0.64% in 2020–21, the most recent financial year for which data are available (see ‘Stagnant funding pool’). This continues a decades-long trend that began under Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, and is lower than for some of India’s peers: China spent 2.4% of GDP on R&D in 2021, Brazil spent 1.3% and Russia spent 1.1%.

Public funding that fails to keep up with growing GDP is a particularly acute problem for science in India, because the government is the main funder of research, says Rohini Godbole, a particle physicist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Government funding accounts for some 60% of R&D spending. By contrast, in the United States, just 20% of total R&D spending comes from the government — with industry and philanthropy contributing the rest.

The relative lack of funds hasn’t stopped India from making big strides forward: in 2023, the nation became only the fourth in the world to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon. Scientists note that this was done at a fraction of the budget of other missions. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) “is known as one of the most frugal organizations in the world”, says Venni Krishna, a science-policy researcher at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney. They’re “doing a fantastic job”. Researchers in India have also contributed to significant advances in developing drugs and vaccines.

But researchers say that other areas of research have been hampered by funding shortfalls, despite announcements that have suggested the opposite. “The government is serious in terms of their policy pronouncements. But when it comes to putting the money in, it’s been very conservative,” says Krishna.

In August 2023, the government passed a bill to set up the National Research Foundation (NRF), modelled on the US National Science Foundation — a move that many researchers applauded. The government promised 500 billion rupees (US$6 billion) for the NRF over 5 years, 28% of which — some 140 billion rupees — would come from public funds, and the rest from private and philanthropic sources. But the government spent only 2.6 billion rupees on the NRF in 2023–24, according to India’s Ministry of Finance. “This is a very, very negligible amount of money,” says Ramvilas Ghosh, a researcher who studies the diversity of marine organisms at Kerala University of Fisheries and Ocean Studies in Kochi.

For 2024–25, the government allocated 20 billion rupees for the NRF, still short of its initial commitment, and it has not clarified where the private funding will come from, says Ghosh.

Another project affected by a funding shortfall is the National Quantum Mission. In 2023, the government promised 60 billion rupees for this over eight years, in an attempt to build quantum computers and develop quantum communications, metrology and materials. The government spent 50 million rupees on the mission in 2023–24, and committed 4.8 billion for 2024–25.

Nature asked representatives of the Indian government for clarification on funding arrangements, but received no response.

More basic science

Indian scientists are part of some prominent international collaborations, including CERN, which operates Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, and ITER, an international nuclear-fusion project based in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, France. But progress on similar, home-grown initiatives in basic-science has been slow over the past decade. When the international LIGO collaboration announced in 2016 that it had made the first direct detection of gravitational waves, Modi posted on social media that he hoped India would move forwards with a detector of its own. But it took another seven years for LIGO-India to be approved by the country’s cabinet. “Progress is still slow,” says Godbole.

An Indian neutrino observatory, approved in 2015, has stalled because of environmental concerns over the site’s location. “Even if it takes off, its relevance is going to be marginal, because of the number of years that went by,” says Godbole.

Part of that might reflect changing priorities. Science is seen increasingly as a tool for development, Godbole says, meaning more funds for technological innovation and socially relevant research at the cost of basic research. Umesh Waghmare, a theoretical and applied physicist at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore says that the current science ecosystem incentivizes applied research, from funding to new awards for technological innovation and missions focused on developing devices. A Modi win is likely to speed up this push for more applied and translational research, says Waghmare, who is also president of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore.

More autonomy

But the government could usefully loosen its tight grip over funding decisions, with high-level government officials having more of an advisory role, and more decision-making powers being given to scientific committees, says Waghmare. “Significantly greater autonomy is essential,” he says.

The NRF is headed by the Prime Minister, ministers and secretaries of government departments, as well as representatives of the business and scientific community picked by the Prime Minister.

And when it comes to public funds, the same rules that govern the construction of large projects such as railways or bridges also apply to smaller research projects, which is “rather unfair”, says Shekhar Mande, former director-general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in Pune.

Even when researchers have been allocated money, it’s been difficult for them to spend all of it, says Shailja Vaidya Gupta, who served as a senior adviser at the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India between 2019 and 2021. That’s because administrative and financial rules for hiring staff, and for purchasing equipment and laboratory supplies, are complex and constantly changing, she explains.

In 2023–24, only an estimated 65 billion of the 106 billion rupees initially allocated for the Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Biotechnology was spent. Gupta hopes that the government will trust researchers more, and will allow them greater flexibility in how they spend their budgets. A large part of ISRO’s success was a result of the decades of administrative and financial autonomy that it was afforded, which offers a model to follow, says Gupta.

As in India’s previous general election in 2019, science has not featured heavily on the 2024 campaign trail. Researchers say they don’t expect to see substantial changes to science policy, whatever the result. “Science is not at all part of the political discourse,” says Achal Agrawal, who founded the Indian Research Watchdog, a volunteer group for investigating research integrity. In that sense, the elections starting next week are unlikely to provide a big turning point for Indian science. “Whether Modi wins or loses, it is going to be more of the same.”