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Science & Tech.
Mahesh

20/01/24 09:42 AM IST

India’s science management

In News
  • The government is overhauling India’s science establishment, which includes setting up the new National Research Foundation (NRF) and restructuring the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).
Expenditure on Science
  • India’s low overall expenditure on research and development (around 0.7% of GDP, compared to 3.5% for the United States and 2.4% for China) is but one aspect constraining its scientific outcomes.
  • In 2022, the Indian Space Research Organisation stood a distant eighth on launch numbers, with foreign startups racing ahead on key technologies such as reusable rockets.
Challenges and Solution
  • First, administering an organisation as complex as a national lab or a university cannot be relegated to becoming a side-project of a ‘working’ scientist doubling up as a director or vice-chancellor.
  • Administration requires a particular skill set, most importantly, the allocation of money, resources and time. Indeed, attributes associated with good scientists, such as individuality, constructive ego, and erudition, have little congruence with the demands of administration — tact, realism, flexibility and firmness.
  • The fundamental role of an administrator is to prioritise one undertaking over another in line with policy and to ensure that resources assigned to one project do not starve others. How then can a good scientist, who is generally driven by individual attribution, be a good administrator, who must be organisationally driven?
  • Second, the lack of comprehensive training in selecting which particular metrics are appropriate under what circumstances leads to absurdities such as an entire project getting derailed due to a single invoice or acquisition.
  • Who is accountable for all the lost time, shelved projects, and wasted money? Scientists, by their very training, are not geared to juggle between several approximate solutions to human and financial problems.
  • Administration is the art of translating policy into outcomes — scientists are simply not trained to prioritise between time, cost, or precision, and certainly not in what proportions.
  • Third, the scope for conflicts of interest in the present dispensation is huge. Being an academic within the same institution in which one wields administrative control is a sure recipe for disaster.
  • Unsavoury examples abound of science administrators engaging in red tapism to mire rivals in unnecessary strictures. Likewise, the culture of Indian science has descended into a quagmire of quid pro quos and shoddy quality control. Thus, scandals such as high plagiarism rates, paid publications in disreputable journals, and under-the-table dealings to garner government funding have become normalised.
  • Poverty forced the country to concentrate high-end equipment in a handful of institutions, primarily the Indian Institutes of Technology in the 1960s.
  • All young scientists had to pay their nazranas at the durbars, in other words, their tributes in the royal courts, to these gatekeepers, making them indebted forever to these bestowers of favours.
  • This system has replicated itself over time to such a degree that appointments, awards, foreign accolades and support from the system overall, depended on continuing to aggrandise the inheritors of these gatekeepers. Many bright scientists’ careers and lives have been destroyed due to their conflicts with this oppressive network of gatekeepers. 
System in U.S. 
  • The separation of administrators and scientists is something which most robust science establishments generally embrace.
  • Even the U.S., with labs being embedded in the university ecosystem and run by scientists, selects scientists for an administrative role quite early on in their careers.
  • Such selected science administrators, by and large, only carry out administrative tasks thereon, and are groomed for the task, with very few of them ever going back to active science.
  • Such a separation has obvious benefits for all stakeholders, except of course the entrenched gatekeepers.
  • As India remoulds its science establishment, one must really question the utility of scientists being given administrative tasks, whether as additional assignments or as full-time vice-chancellors or directors.
  • Perhaps an American middle-way arrangement, where scientists are selected and trained in an all-India pool of a science administration central service, is the answer.
  • In such a dispensation, university vice-chancellors would have greater bargaining power vis-à-vis the bureaucracy within the university as well as that of the ministries if they belong to an all-India service having received the appropriate training.
Way forward
  • Administration is something which has to be taught and practised separately from the subject matter being administered.
  • The administrative setup of any complex is its central nervous system, and the same is true for science establishments.
  • Without addressing these core concerns, India’s science establishment will continue to do injustice to its economic and strategic aspirations.
Source- The Hindu

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