Role of Money in Indian Science
Gajendra Raghava
Saturday, 05 January 2008 18:56 UTC
I am a scientist working in India from last 20 years (see http://www.imtech.res.in/raghava/ ). I read lot of postings on poor performance of India in science so I thought I should also share my views with other colleagues. These are my personal views, please forgive me if you do not like them. Their are number of reasons why India is not doing well in Science. This is a complex issue and no single reason is sufficient to justify the reason. Though most of us do no accept that money is major reason for poor performance but I feel money plays a major role in science. In order to perform scientific experiment one need costly equipment and infrastructure; talent alone is not sufficient. This is the reason we always perform well in theortical science as one can perform even in absance of infrastructure. I have work in different countries and different groups and found Indian are as intellegent and knowledgable as anybody. I do not found any fault in education system, even I feel that our student are more comptitive. In order to prove any idea you need to perform experiment using costly and latest equipment; without that you are handicap. These scientific equipments are costly partcularly equipment used in biological sciences. Most of our universty have subscription to very limitted number of journals, how one can do research in absence of access to literature. In simple words we do not have adequate infrastructure due to lack of money at most of places.
An average fresh postdoctoral fellow in US got five times salary than senior scientist in India. My salary in USA is more than 12 times than my salary in India (during my short visits to USA). Now some people will say why money is important for a scientis. It is beacuse they have family, they also live in society, they also need all facilities, above of all they work hard. This is one of the reason our scientist visit foriegn countries. Its difficult to attract tallent with present salary system. Due to salary system science profession is not popular in India, kids wants to become manager, civil servent, engineer or doctor but not scientist. It is because, we do not see any crorepati scientist, where it is common in other profession. Most of us we expect that other will sacrifies for country why we should sacrifice at end of day nobody sacrifice. It is not India but it is all over world the research output is propotion to budget spend on research. This is the reason USA is able to attract more talent than other countries. I believe per dollor research output is very high in India. The question is whether situation in India is improving our not. It is improving because we have lot of grants nowadys for scientific research. Today, we may afford to costly equipment in India as Govt. is giving good funds. Only problem is salary, though getting grant in India is easy than getting grant in USA but it is not linked with salary. It means your salary will be same whether you got grant or not, perform or not, which is a major problem. I can easily get grant of few crores but I can not pay more than fifteen thousand to my Postdoc. Our institute produce more than 20 PhD every year most of them are working abroad other side we are not able to fill our scientific positions. Some time we feel that we are simply training them to work abroad. We can not retain our PhD as we can not offer attractive salary. We may also produce good research if we got money and freedom to spend money the way we wish to spend. In that case we may pay high salary to our work force (PDF or other staff) in order to attract best tallent in the world. In my view money is major factor behind science other factors are associated with it. It is not that all our scientific work force is happy abroad but they are their because they are getting more salary.
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Dear Sir, It is not only the question of money it is also the question of doing something innovative.
Indian scientists do not publish in any of the high impact journals and when they do it is only when they are abroad.
The second thing is the lack of trained manpower with hands on experience.
Science in this country can only prosper if we have the will as well as courage to carry things.
Look at the Indian Biotech companies and tell me if any of their products are innovative ? meaning they just duplicate things that are done abroad.R&D is a very risky game and we don’t have the vision to do it.
It might sound very harsh to you but science is not meant for people who do not have the ability to innovate. They know how to obviate, but innovation requires hard work and dedication which is not concerned with money at all. -
Dear Anonymous
I have simple question, are you doing science or just talking theortical. From your email it seems you have very little knowledge of science. In todays in order to prove anything you need to work in group. I will give simple equations in Indian Universities working hands are students (M.Sc./B.Tech/B.Sc etc.) where students work for few months, so most of papers they publish in Indian journals. In Indian reputed institutes like (IMT, CCMB, IGIB etc.) their working force is PhD students where Scientist spend one-two year to train these students and for two-three years they take work from these students. Thus these institutes publish papers in reputed journals with impact factor around (equivelent to average group in USA) even some paper in Science/Nature. In USA/Europe working hands are PDF who are well trained/PhD from countries like India. This is the reason they are able to perform much better than our groups. My own students after doing PhD from my group are working in my competitors Group in USA/Europe. Thus output direcly depend on your workfore not only on hardwork.This is also misunderstanding in public that our scientists are not performing. Indian Scientists are doing very well in given situation. Please try to understand Science and contribution of Indian Scientist before making any comment.
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Dear sir,
It is absolutely correct, Money plays a very important role in the growth of science. It is atleast right time now, if not late, knowledge commision should insist on govt. for completely revising the salary of scientific workforce. Do we still afford to miss the bus on being a biotech , drug discovery services, bioinformatics hub?? If so, in my personal opinion we will be killing our potentially blooming especially (biotech, drugdiscovery related services)which has the potential even to overtake the IT success of our country, given our competence, low cost advantage of our country.(I am just relating biotech related services, same applies to various other cutting science and engineering disciplines)
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Dear Dr. Raghava.. Well said on salary stuff.. you pushed the right button.. but don’t know when light will turn on..
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I think Brazil has many similarities with India, so I feel I can join the conversation. :)
Money is certainly important, but we always have to remember that salaries are always a bit proportional to the cost of where you live… You can’t just go on comparing the value of the student scholarships, we must compare their homes, food, health care, et cetera. (I win around 800 dollars a week.)
We also have this difficulty with importing equipment for doing “contemporary research”, but something that bugs me is that we see few people concerned with manufacturing those high-tech equipment in, say, India or Brazil. We care more for having great scientists than for having great producers of scientific equipment… But we need “primary industries” for doing great science as much as we need the scientists. The works that show up in Nature articles and Nobel prizes and are just the tip of the iceberg.
One interesting aspect of Brazilian technology (I would like to know about India) is that while we are always a step behind from the rich world, when the new technologies come to us it is often an enhanced second generation of equipment, so we end up popularizing a better technology from the start, while the rich countries have the trouble of doing the first transition… This is something we must try to use in our favour.
Also, in Brazil we often see researches about doing things in a more economical way. That’s the way to go: search for a way to do what you need when you don’t have the money to do it the easy way, and not just dream about having exactly the same equipment the rich folks work with.
And let’s always remember logic is universal, and to think is for free (I mean, it does cost a bit of sugar…). And it is not bad to develop more a intellectual research if you don’t have money for experimental. This kind of research must grow together with a large and rich industry, which will supply the high-tech equipment, and also benefit from the “applied” experiments. I don’t think you should dream of a university full of modern and expansive equipment without a solid and rich industry developed in the same country. If you don’t want just to study chess, you must do more then ask for money to buy expansive equipment, you must fight for a society where this investment is done in a natural way, and this means a more powerful industry outside the academy. While the day doesn’t come, let’s keep studying more calculus then they do!...
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Dear Dr. Raghava,
I too agree with you as you will find in a similar topic – Indian Post-docs for INDIA, posted on 31st Dec. Now for the salary issue, which though correct would not be possible to commensurate wrt US/Europe in couple of decades as other government employees (non-academic) would also require similar salary. However, you might have already witnessed the almost 1.5 times increment in the JRF and SRF fellowships from UGC, CSIR and ICMR. We also have couple of fellowships like swarnajayanti fellowship, JC Bose National fellowship and ramanujam fellowship which provide additional/competitive financial aid. What I suggest is that we need more of similar fellowships, wherein competitive and performance based perks/fellowships are available.
But the above mentioned fellowships are for scientists only. So, I strongly recommend similar fellowships (~50k) for post-docs too. As you are in many Indian-science-policy committes and meet the top notch policy makers, hope you would take up this issue. This would definitely help in pulling-back substantial (if not all!!) of the post-docs.
regards,
KH -
Dear Sir!
i have majord in Cognitive Science from CBCS, University of Allahabad (2006) and currently pursuing a defence project @ BHU on cognitive neuroscience of attention.
i shuld really appreciate ur gesture of looking the potentials in our gentry to account for innovative endeavors in sciences and other streams.
my concern f scrappin u is tht its true the current settings of workforce do have potentials and money can also be availed on competetive basis but the inbreeding nature of some streams in India do put back our initiatives of genuinity. i specifically mean tht if students & teachers can be hired from abroad (as Canadians & American does)atleast new groups of thinking tanks can be developed. i am also aware tht various symposiums and conferences being organised from time to time do provide such platforms bt the proportion of such events is really meagre and quality also at times questionable.
so if something can be done on this issue i think we can also have our impact not merely on publications but also on other accademic platforms.
with regards! -
Dear All
Could you please avoid the chat room language and communicate in simple English? It makes for better reading and
I am directing this mail to Saha.On the other hand, this is a good topic for discussion and I would like to see more opinions on this
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If one has enough experience, one knows that the research is a group effort—Technicians, Students, Postdocs, Professors and also Government polices and enough funding are required in favor of research. However, to perform better in limited resources (with limited money) in a country like India, I suppose that a group should try to collaborate with more and more groups in order to have access to different equipments/systems. And travel grants to the students and postdocs should help to actively collaborate. Being from India, I know that universities collaborate with institutes but I personally feel that such collaborations need more motivation. For example, some research organization can start ‘travel grants’ for students/postdocs to travel across india, to any collaborative institute, because students are generally given very limited fellowship/ no fellowship in some cases and universities generally do not support travelling. Some such policies may help to solve this problem upto an extent.
As research is a group effort, more collaborations may enhance the qulity and expand horizons.
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I agree with the authors view about the issue.
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