India?s strive towards self-reliance shaped its post-independence policy agenda in all spheres. The pursuit of science and technology under government patronage was an integral part of this agenda, which led to the establishment of universities and institutes of higher learning and research as well as publicly funded S&T organisations. However, aggregate R&D expenditure in India has remained rather low at less than 1% of its GDP.
A quick international comparison in the accompanying table reveals that developed countries on an average spend over 2% of their GDP on R&D, a cut above India?s spending. China spends 1.4% of its GDP on R&D, again ahead of India. Interestingly, however, the lion?s share (nearly 75%) of India?s R&D expenditure is publicly funded and only a quarter is borne by the private sector.
Despite this concerted effort, India has not succeeded in reaching the global frontiers of cutting edge research in science. Moreover, our industry has also not benefited significantly from home-grown technologies with university-industry interface remaining sub-optimal. Publicly funded research has not adequately contributed to the process of technological learning and catch-up by the
Indian industry. Indeed, inventions generated from publicly funded research in India, however sporadic and few they may be, remain largely unnoticed by the industry. Even when noticed, such inventions are not picked up due to heavy development costs and uncertainties. This is not to suggest that Indian policymakers did not realise the importance of publicly funded scientific research and the possible role it could play in boosting industrial competitiveness.
Keeping in mind the low levels of effective university-industry technology transfer in India, a possible corrective step was conceived in terms of a legal framework for intellectual property rights (IPRs) in the academic sector (publicly funded research).The idea was first mooted by the National Knowledge Commission in 2007 and was adopted by the government through the introduction of a new legislation, along the lines of the US Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. The Protection and Utilisation of Public Funded IP Bill 2008 is presently with the Parliament. The Bill seeks to assign the ownership rights of publicly funded patents to universities in order to facilitate their commercialisation by incentivising the industry and assuring them exclusive license rights for further development and marketing. Moreover, it is through this law that the government also seeks to incentivise and energise creativity and innovation in publicly funded research.
Although patenting is still relatively uncommon among academic researchers in India, some of the S&T organisations, particularly within the CSIR network, have put in place institutional frameworks for patenting research outputs. It may be noted that the number of US patents granted to CSIR jumped to 196 in 2005-06 from just 6 in 1990-91. On the other hand, India?s contribution to the world publications has increased from 2.1% during 1995-2000 to 2.3% during 2000-05. Although the effective contribution of Indian scientists in the international scientific community has gone up, India?s impact factor is not yet at par with the world average in most scientific fields, except for physics where it has made significant gains with an impact factor of 3.1 during 2003-07.
For a long time, concerns related to intellectual property rights did not bother Indian academic scientists. In a recent econometric study, the authors explored some of the less understood relationships that explain faculty inclination towards patenting in Indian universities. These include the importance of faculty background and attitude. Faculty with a doctoral degree from abroad are more inclined to patenting. The dynamism of the younger generation of faculty combined with academic maturity of the professorial level is the ideal combination for encouraging university patenting. Faculty with a positive attitude towards research supervision and a larger team of research students engage more in patenting their research.
Policymakers in India have been arguing that the absence of a clear IPRs framework prevents the industry from accepting university inventions. Literature on the US experience post-Bayh Dole, however, does not present an unambiguous picture in this regard. Evidence suggests that although the decades that followed saw a huge rise in university held patents, there was only a modest increase in their licensing and that too mostly for a few top-ranking universities. Given the heterogeneity in the quality and content of publicly funded research in India, it remains to be seen how a uniform IP law for all publicly funded organisations could be tailored to suit every tier of the quality spectrum, if at all. Different constituencies are expected to respond differently to a new institutional/legal framework. It is in this context that one fears that a ?one size fits all? approach could be counterproductive.
Policymakers also argue that IP rights vested with individual universities are more efficient as they reduce direct bureaucratic control from funding agencies. However, in India funding agencies have rarely staked IP claims in the first place. CSIR, for example, holds patent rights for all publicly funded research outputs and has also licensed them exclusively in some cases. Therefore, possible bottlenecks in the process of commercialisation of publicly funded patents in India cannot be directly linked to IP ownership per se.
IPRs have so far been acting as a viable business proposition for knowledge-based industries where production of knowledge essentially depends on the extent to which it can be appropriated. But would such business models work for universities? Universities in the West have tried out operational business models for encouraging university scientists to become entrepreneurs with equity shareholding in spin-offs. This worked well in some cases (e.g.,Silicon Valley around Stanford and Route 128 near MIT). Nevertheless, universities are known to conventionally follow an altogether different model of knowledge creation that goes beyond private appropriation paving the way for wider dissemination through publication and teaching. It remains true that university scientists? own urge towards solving research puzzles would continue to be the dominant driver of their research. Indeed, excessive focus on career advancement often proves counterproductive for faculty?s research performance as far as their individual publication rates are concerned.
Going beyond IPR, a more fundamental bottleneck hindering university-industry technology transfer in India is a mismatch of research temperament and a lack of understanding between the two. Indian industry is often myopic and averse to taking risks. On the other hand, industry has always alleged that university research in India is too tangential to have direct commercial applications. Therefore, there may be further need to explore possibilities of appropriate profile-matching between the two to achieve successful university-industry technology transfer in the long-run.
Under these circumstances, implementing laws for promoting university patenting might lead to another futile public policy exercise resulting in filing and maintaining large unutilised government patents at the cost of public money. Introduction of an ?Indian? Bayh-Dole for energising academic research that overlooks the realities of the differences in context, environment, culture and level of scientific achievements between the US and India might be tantamount to putting the cart before the horse.
Amit Shovon Ray is professor, JNU and Chair Professor, Icrier. His coauthor Sabyasachi Saha is researcher, Icrier. Views are personal.