Science education has been in a crisis in India for a while now. So, it is to be dearly hoped that a government proposal?scholarships of Rs 5,000 per annum to be granted to a maximum of one million students, provided they pick science in high school?changes the incentive structure. It is because science is losing popularity in school that the proportion of college students opting for science has dropped from 32% in 1950 to 15% in 2000. The direct outcome of this is poor science in universities. So, the government is right that the problem should be tackled at the school level. One wonders, though, whether the scholarship is substantial enough. Five thousand rupees a year for a middle class family student doesn?t sound attractive enough. More needs to be done to catch up with China, which increased the number of scientific papers published 104 times between1980 and 2005. India managed an increase of only 2.3 times during the same period. In the 1970s things were quite different?Indian scientists accounted for about half of the developing world?s quality science papers. The Science Citation Index in the 1970s placed India at eighth in the world behind only the US, UK, USSR, France, Japan and Canada. By 2000, India had slid to 15th position. The decline is worrying, especially since India has ambitions of becoming a ?knowledge? economy.
The country needs to increase its share of scientists in the total workforce 12 times to meet the OECD benchmark, 0.5% of the workforce in R&D. Expenditure on R&D per capita in India is $5.5, compared to $978 in Japan and $705 in the US and $11.7 in China. Private funding of R&D is, of course, important, and Indian corporates lag in this. But the role of public funding should not be underestimated?the US funds almost half of all its scientific research through government financial support. India needs its government to spend more on science?the scholarship scheme should just be the beginning. But science & technology research in public institutions has traditionally been victim of bureaucratic interference. And if funding goes up, it is pretty certain control will go up as well. Quality of work needs to be monitored. Peer group monitoring in institutions is far better than babu-neta audits.
