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.