Only about one in 4 public-funded analysis and improvement organisations in India give incubation support to start-ups and just one in six present support to ‘deep tech’ startups. Only 15% collaborated with trade abroad and solely half of them opened their services to exterior researchers and college students, say the findings of a study commissioned by the Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor and executed by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Centre for Technology, Innovation, and Economic Research.
The study, through an in depth questionnaire, requested labs to charge themselves and provide information on 62 parameters equivalent to their spend on R&D, variety of younger scientists, patents filed, applied sciences developed, participation of ladies scientists and their contribution to ‘national missions’ equivalent to Deep Ocean Mission, National Quantum Mission, and many others.
Labs of the ‘strategic sector’ equivalent to these belonging to defence analysis, house, atomic power analysis — all of which represent the lion’s share of India’s general Research and Development (R&D) spend — have been excluded from the study because of the “sensitive nature of their work”. The labs studied have been these affiliated to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the Department of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and many others.
The Central authorities expenditure on R&D was round ₹55,685 crore in 2020-21, the determine cited in the study and the most recent obtainable. Excluding the expenditure of the strategic departments like DRDO (Defence), DAE (Atomic power) and DoS (Space), the spending by key scientific companies and different Central authorities departments was ₹24,587 crore.
Around 25% of the taking part establishments reported spending between 75% and 100% of their price range on R&D. The organizations that reported lower than the median share of spending on R&D and S&T (Science and Technology) in the general price range have been largely from ICAR (Agricultural analysis), CSIR, ICMR (Medical analysis), Ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda and conventional medication) and DST (Science and Technology).
Staff power down
Numerous labs/institutes reported a lower in the variety of everlasting workers in 2022-23 in comparison with the earlier yr and an elevated reliance — from 17,234 to 19,625 — on contractual workers.
The median share of younger researchers elevated in 2022-23 to round 58 per cent from 54 per cent in the earlier yr. In the earlier train, for round 193 organisations that had participated, this quantity was round 63 per cent to 65 per cent for the interval from 2017-18 to 2019-20.
“This is the second time that we have had such an analysis. What we intend is that the data from such a study be closely analysed by institutions so that they can identify areas of improvement,” mentioned Dr. Ajay Sood, Principal Scientific Adviser, “Overall, several researchers seem to have oriented themselves from being centres of scientific inquiry to innovation centres. I see that as a positive development. Academia and product innovation must go hand in hand.”
As a part of its advice, the report advocates that each lab ought to be “mandated to review their existing mandates” and align themselves to Viksit Bharat objectives. The mandate ought to concentrate on “critical technologies” as directed by the federal government and be taken on a “war footing” by public-funded R&D organisations. They ought to work carefully with trade in addition to with one another.
Published – April 29, 2025 10:28 pm IST
