Intellectual bottlenecks

: 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.