This paper critically evaluates NITI Aayog’s Ease of Doing Research and Development in India report. While the report correctly identifies operational bottlenecks to India's S&T R&D paradigm, its actionable policy recommendations skew heavily toward translational outcomes, omitting basic science. This lack of focus on an already under-resourced fundamental research foundation has grave potential implications on citizen scientific temper and broad, long-term societal progress. Finally, the paper suggests approaches to create citizen-led impact through common policy & engagement opportunities available currently in Indian S&T.

Note: This is a community-contributed opinion piece.

NITI Aayog’s policy report from earlier this year, Ease of Doing Research and Development in India: Removing Obstacles, Promoting Enablers, is a 60000 feet view on the collection of structural issues that affect the Indian Science, Tech & Innovation (STI) system. The report identifies structural bottlenecks that hinder research productivity and outlines policy and operational mechanisms to build better R&D infrastructure for India. It is hence a very useful starting point for us to study the practical issues and policy realities of this domain, and to find opportunities for our ecosystem in solving some of these problems.

Charles Lindblom's theory of incrementalism argued that policymakers almost never build solutions from a clean slate, but rather operate under bounded rationality and time constraints make small, incremental adjustments to existing policies[1]. This report is a collection of policy problems which have been echoed by think tanks/researchers/policy folks in the sector. I have outlined where they first surfaced in policy/public documents[2]. As a consequence, most solutions recommended in section 3 represent the culmination of incremental policy evolution, and hence, I have traced their precedents.

Scope, Methodology, and Sampling

Prepared in consultation with the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), the report draws from an extensive multi-stakeholder assessment:

  1. Institutional Consultations: Formal inputs from over 60 premier research institutions, including Centrally Funded Technical Institutes (CFTIs), autonomous laboratories (under DST, DBT, and CSIR), and state universities.
  2. Scientist and Administrator Survey: Granular survey data from 878 active researchers, principal investigators (PIs), and research administrators across disciplines, alongside responses from more than 400 institutional heads.
  3. Regional Deliberations: Eight regional consultative brainstorming sessions (hosted at hubs such as IIT Kanpur and CSIR-IICT Hyderabad) analyzing operational pain points across the R&D lifecycle—from ideation and grant procurement to commercial technology transfer.

Core Findings: The Five Structural Bottlenecks

  1. Macroeconomic Underinvestment and Funding Asymmetries:
    1. Stagnant R&D Intensity: India’s Gross Expenditure on Research and Development (GERD) hovers at ~0.65% of GDP, creating a significant capital deficit compared to global innovation leaders such as South Korea (~4.5%), the United States (~3.5%), and China (~2.4%)[3].
    2. Public-Heavy Imbalance: Approximately 64% of domestic R&D expenditure is financed directly by the public exchequer, with private industry contributing under 40%, inverting the ratio observed in advanced economies, where the private sector provides 65% to 75% of research capital[4].
    3. Resource Concentration: Public research allocations are heavily skewed toward a small cluster of elite institutions. For instance, over 80% of competitive grant allocations (such as ANRF funding) flow exclusively to the IITs and select CFTIs, leaving State Public Universities (SPUs),which educate the vast majority of graduate students, chronically underfinanced[5].
    4. Inter-Agency Duplication: Funding is fragmented across independent ministries with little cross-agency coordination, resulting in redundant investments across parallel programs[6] (e.g., duplicate funding of clean hydrogen and carbon capture initiatives across DST and CSIR).
  2. Human Capital Vulnerabilities and Postdoctoral Precarity:
    1. Researcher Density Deficits: India maintains only 262 Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) researchers per million people, compared to 1,585 in China and 4,821 in the United States[7].
    2. Fragile Postdoctoral Pipeline: The domestic postdoctoral ecosystem lacks institutional standing, career progression models, and financial parity, driving leading doctoral talent to pursue opportunities abroad[8].
    3. Fellowship Disbursal Delays: Fellowship payouts for doctoral and postdoctoral scholars experience recurrent multi-month delays across central portals, creating financial instability and discouraging students from pursuing research careers[9].
    4. Institutional Vacancies: Protracted recruitment cycles and bureaucratic delays leave a substantial portion of sanctioned university faculty and technical support positions vacant[8:1].
  3. Compliance Burden and Operational Friction:
    1. Fragmented Grant Portals: Researchers navigate disparate, non-interoperable application systems across various agencies, resulting in redundant administrative submissions and protracted 8- to 14-month proposal evaluation timelines[9:1].
    2. Inflexible Financial Regulations: Grant budgets remain bound by rigid line-item accounting that restricts the re-allocation of funds between capital, consumables, and travel as experimental needs evolve[10].
    3. Procurement and Supply Chain Friction: Mandatory procurement policies (such as GeM compliance and lowest-bidder/L1 purchase mandates) frequently conflict with the need for specialized, research-grade biochemicals and precision analytical instrumentation, causing extensive project delays[10:1].
    4. Dual Institutional Governance: State-level institutions often face operational friction due to split authority structures, where administrative positions (such as Registrars) are staffed by state civil services while academic direction rests with Vice-Chancellors[11].
  4. Translational Deficits and Weak Commercialization:
    1. The Lab-to-Market Gap: Despite India ranking 6th globally in total patent filings (with over 64,480 filings in 2023), technology licensing and commercial translation remain low.
    2. Lack of R&D offices in Institutions: R&D institutions and HEIs Institutions should set up professional R&D Offices as single-window hubs for grant management, &grant them adequate authority & operational freedom[12].
    3. Under-Resourced Technology Transfer: Most universities lack dedicated, professionally staffed Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) with the legal and commercial expertise required to negotiate IP licensing and spin-off equity[13].
    4. Restricted Academia-Industry Mobility: Rigid employment regulations prevent university faculty and industrial researchers from undertaking cross-sector sabbaticals, joint appointments, or direct commercial ventures[13:1].
    5. Absence of Regulatory Sandboxes: Emerging deep-tech sectors (such as synthetic biology, advanced materials, and quantum systems) lack specialized regulatory sandboxes, delaying rapid pilot testing and deployment[14].
  5. Asymmetries in Knowledge Access:
    1. Fragmented Literature Access: Access to international scientific literature remains unevenly distributed. The central One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) initiative remains restricted to public institutions, leaving state and private universities cut off from primary scientific databases[15].
    2. Domestic Journal Quality: Many domestic journals struggle with inconsistent peer-review workflows, limited international citation indexing, and weak web discoverability[16].

The ROPE Reform Architecture: Actionable Recommendations

To transition from compliance-heavy oversight to an outcome-driven research framework, NITI Aayog introduces the ROPE (Removing Obstacles, Promoting Enablers) strategy.

  1. Removing Obstacles:
    1. UPMS Integration: Single-window portal, ORCID/ROR/Grant DOI linking
      1. DST's legacy e-PMS system, Gati Shakti single window clearance portals operate the same way.
      2. For eliminating redundant entries in a single window, inspiration comes from:
        1. US NSF's SciENcv, which connects ORCID accounts to Research.gov in applying for a grant.
        2. UKRI uses a similar "single front door" model, attaching ORCID IDs to funding service profiles.
        3. While ORCID is free for individual researchers, the Indian Government is likely going to use ORCID Consortium membership. The INFLIBNET Centre (an autonomous centre under MoE & UGC) builds & runs the VIDWAN (doesn't run) & IRINS platforms, which connect to ORCID infra through a member API (which allows them to pull structured metadata). But Indian researchers applying for grants will be forced to create ORCID accounts.
        4. ORCID is better than Google Scholar or Academia.org which are both paid & for-profit.
    2. "Vigyan Nidhi": Direct, automated, zero-delay fellowship platform for NITI Aayog's One Nation, One Fellowship Portal, operationalized under ANRF.
      1. Mentions don't exist before this report.
    3. De-bureaucratized Audits: Line-item flexibility & trust-based checks
      1. Tough to know where the trust based checks come from (perhaps from other ministries financial guidelines). Line-item flexibility has been successful in multiple agencies such as CSIR & DST where expenditure is held under panel review rather than cross-ministry review which causes multiple bottlenecks.
  2. Promoting enablers
    1. GERD Expansion: Target 2% of GDP via CSR and corporate incentives
    2. Knowledge Equity: Expand ONOS to state & private HEIs on cost-share
    3. Translational Engine: Professionalized TTOs, RDI clusters, sandboxes
    4. Apex Steering: Establish NISPG for data-driven science governance
  3. Policy pillars
    1. Pillar 1: Fiscal Expansion and Private Capital Mobilization
      1. 2% GERD Target: Establish a 4- to 5-year timeline to raise national GERD to at least 2% of GDP, targeting equal 50:50 cost-sharing between public allocations and private industry[17].
      2. Leveraging CSR and Corporate Incentives: Reform corporate reporting and provide expanded tax incentives under the Companies Act to channel private capital and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funds directly into research consortia, state university laboratories, and translational incubators.
      3. Capitalizing Deep-Tech Funds: Deploy the ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development, and Innovation (RDI) fund and the ANRF to provide long-term, patient capital for strategic research initiatives.
      4. ESOP Taxation Rationalising to Strengthen Deep-Tech Talent Retention: Taken from National Startup Policy 2023, this aims to make it conducive for startups to use ESOPs as a way for retaining high-quality talent, by aligning the deferment of the time of payment of tax on ESOP with the sale of shares and make it available to employees of more startups.
    2. Pillar 2: Digital Modernization via UPMS and "Vigyan Nidhi"
      1. Unified Project Management System (UPMS): Implement an interoperable single-window portal across all central (DST, DBT, CSIR, ICMR) and state grant-awarding bodies.
      2. Persistent Identifiers (PIDs): Standardize national grant management through integrated metadata systems:
        1. Grant DOIs & ORCID: Universal digital IDs for all researchers to streamline proposal histories and reduce redundant biographical entries.
        2. ROR IDs (Research Organization Registry): Standardized institutional tracking to ensure equitable regional grant allocation.
        3. "Vigyan Nidhi" Fellowship Platform: Deploy a centralized digital platform to automate the tracking and direct-benefit transfer of doctoral and postdoctoral stipends, eliminating administrative payout delays.
    3. Pillar 3: Translational Hubs and Regulatory Modernization
      1. Institutionalized Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs): Fund and establish dedicated regional TTOs staffed with IP attorneys and technology valuation specialists, supported by standardized model agreements (MoUs) for licensing and technology transfer[18].
      2. National TRL Taxonomy adopted along Empowered Nodal Institutions: Establishing standardized baseline TRL-funding criteria across deep-tech, electronics, materials, and digital domains under ANRF. Designating specific technical bodies (such as select IITs, CSIR labs, or accredited testing centers) as official TRL Certification Nodes to audit, physically validate, and issue binding readiness certificates for RDIF applicants[19].
      3. Regional RDI Clusters: Establish cross-disciplinary Research, Development, and Innovation (RDI) Clusters linking central national laboratories, state universities, and industrial parks[20].
        1. As a policy it is inspired from the Silicon Valley/Stanford Research Park cluster, though such clusters are at the cutting edge of industrial innovation everywhere in the world.
        2. Enable Better IP Ownership Norms for Co-funded R&D: A clear and standardised IP framework for co-funded research, such as a suitable provision in Rule 233 of the GFR for co-sharing of IPR may be introduced for jointly funded R&D projects between industry and public funded institutions.
        3. Create a linking framework for Incubators across ministries/ departments should be developed, possibly by Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) or the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), for enhancing capacity, integration and synergy across the incubation ecosystem[21].
        4. Establish a Centre for Technology Indigenization (CTI) which can help identify priority technologies for indigenization through analysis of import trends and national priorities, and maintain a centralized repository. It can coordinate with MSMEs to facilitate indigenization of relevant technologies.
      4. Deep-Tech Regulatory Sandboxes: Create agile regulatory environments within biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence to accelerate the clinical and commercial testing of domestic innovations [22].
      5. Grassroots Innovation: Establish dedicated Grassroots Innovation Cells within all State Science and Technology Councils to fund and protect sub-national informal intellectual property.
        1. The most relevant bit for MOSAIC's work, GICs started as a proposal all the way back to 2000 with DST's National Innovation Fund[23].
        2. State Innovation Councils were then set up in 22 states & UTs in 2010, on advice of the National Innovation Council (operating out of the PMO) to house the GICs but failed since they were largely advisory bodies without budget allocations in state finance bills. Most were ultimately dissolved by 2014 along with the NIC as NITI Aayog took over the NIC functions. Report asks to re-establish them, centrally now.
        3. DPIIT came up with the National IPR Policy in 2016 which aimed to provide financial & administrative support to IP generation & protection for grassroot innovations, especially in rural areas.
        4. STIP 2020 policy revived the majorly defunct State Science and Technology Councils (SSTCs), which have existed since the 1970s (funded through DST), as primary nodes for decentralized STI governance.
        5. Now the GICs will be housed within the SSTCs, which will also serve as regional screening nodes for ANRF to distribute targeted R&D funds directly to State Public Universities.
    4. Pillar 4: Democratizing Infrastructure and Scientific Knowledge
      1. Universalizing ONOS: Expand the One Nation One Subscription initiative on a cost-sharing framework to include state universities, affiliated colleges, and accredited private institutions.
        1. Institutes have to register themselves on ONOS, following which researchers can access resources either on campus or off campus.
        2. ONOS has 13000 journals from over 30 academic publishers such as Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, OUP, CUP, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) etc.
        3. Indian Access Management Federation INFED is the federation operator in India, maintaining the cryptographic trust metadata shared between 6,500+ government higher educational/R&D institutions and foreign publisher endpoints.
      2. National Research Repository: Build an open-access, discoverable national repository for all publicly funded Indian research papers, raw datasets, and clinical trial results.
        1. For research papers, India has National Digital Library of India (NDLI), hosted by IIT Kharagpur, under MoE.
        2. Shodhganga for Indian theses.
        3. IRINS for Indian Researcher Network
        4. Indian Biological Data Centre hosts biological data & datasets, operating under DBT
        5. Open Government Data Portal (OGD) houses public sector operational, economic, and demographic data under the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP), but is not designed for scientific bench-level raw experimental data.
        6. Clinical Trials Registry India (CTRI) is managed by ICMR’s National Institute of Medical Statistics, as a mandatory primary registry for protocol registration of clinical trials conducted in India. While trial design, objectives, and basic summary outcomes are public, CTRI does not serve as an open-access repository for raw patient-level datasets or full peer-reviewed result manuscripts. (They have a legit early 2000s website)
        7. National Health Research Data Repository managed by ICMR, it allows researchers to browse health metadata such as study summaries and request data-driven insights, but raw clinical datasets are not open-access or directly downloadable.
        8. Bhoonidhi, Bhuvan, MOSDAC, VEDAS are all administered by ISRO/Dept of Space.
        9. INCOIS & IndOBIS are administered by Ministry of Earth Sciences.
        10. MeiTY operates the largest amount of research & data:IndiaAI datasets, BHASHINI, host AI & Language translation data, OpenForge is the public repository for open-source collaborative development, MeitY startup hub lab directory is a national database mapping specialized R&D infrastructure for researchers to locate & book, CERT-in runs a cybersecurity threats & vulnerabilities list on their 2000s looking website
        11. While there are many data & research repositories, most are only really linked to other repositories of the same ministry. A centralized, cross-ministerial research repository like the one proposed is definitely missing.
      3. National Software and Tool Licensing: Implement nationwide bulk licenses for critical scientific modeling, CAD, bioinformatics, and analytical software platforms.
        1. IMO this is the most sweeping infrastructure/public expenditure change the policy proposes. Instead of the decentralized institution-by-institution model of software procurement which is currently in place, under GFR rules, this policy aims to set up a national bulk model. This bulk model would be great for state universities, which are usually severely underfunded & resource constrained while educating 90% of graduates in the country. Centrally Funded Technical Institutions (CFTIs) have dedicated Computer Service Centres (like the IITD one, IISc one) & are the ones able to procure institution-wide or department-wide floating concurrent licenses for their campus networks.
      4. R&D in State Institutions: The STI capabilities of states and state institutions remain underdeveloped due to inadequate funding, limited research infrastructure, faculty shortages and overall weak R&D culture.
        1. Develop a suitable framework for collaboration between centrally funded R&D institutions/HEIs with the state level HEIs and S&T institutions.
        2. Develop an enabling mechanism to transfer some of the functional R&D equipment in central institutions to state institutions.
    5. Pillar 5: Long-Term Governance via NISPG
      1. Establishment of the NISPG: Establish the National Institute for Science Policy and Governance (NISPG) as an apex body under DST[24] modeled after international science policy institutions (such as Japan’s NISTEP & South Korea's STEPI[25]).
        1. Mandate: The NISPG will oversee STI data analytics, evaluate national research productivity, conduct foresight assessments for emerging technologies, and build administrative capacity across science ministries to move the ecosystem from process-compliance toward trust-based, outcome-driven oversight.
        2. Serving as India's central hub for STI data, analytics, and foresight, NISPG will evaluate the end-to-end R&D lifecycle, develop policy compliance scorecards, and benchmark national scientific governance against global standards. Furthermore, it will function as a premier capacity-building institution, offering structured training for science administrators and leadership in partnership with domestic academies and international organizations.
        3. The precedence for this policy was the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research administered National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies (NISTADS) as India's dedicated public research institute for science policy, scientometrics, and technological history, eventually merged with NISCAIR[26] to form CSIR-NIScPR (National Institute of Science Communication and Policy Research), which runs as an internal CSIR lab.
        4. It is also inspired by the DST's Centre for Policy Research at IISc, IITD & in other institutions.

What opportunities does it present for our ecosystem?

  1. This report is fundamentally focusing on translational research, and creating systems for better optimisation of available resources (finances, researchers, access to markets) for that rather than using them for increasing the scientific temper of society, or increasing the footprint/availability of resources/opportunities for basic research.
  2. This may be by design, and there are many reasons for this (role of apex bodies vs. research & academic institutions, translational research being closer to innovation frontier, having more economic advantage & being more quantifiable, as well as having more concentrated benefits), but India's broken basic research infrastructure is a big issue which is not being meaningfully addressed even at the state governments/research & academic institutions level[27], though this report does make attempts to cover it.
  3. The basic research problems targeted in this report have nonetheless been covered from an apex-body, institutional framework perspective, such as:
    1. UPMS integration
    2. Vigyan Nidhi, a direct, automated, zero-delay fellowship platform for NITI Aayog's One Nation, One Fellowship Portal, operationalized under ANRF
    3. De-bureaucratized Audits
    4. Setting up grassroots innovation cells in state S&T councils
    5. Developing a suitable framework for collaboration between CFTIs and state institutes
    6. Developing an enabling mechanism to transfer functional R&D equipment in central institutions to state institutions.
  4. There’s the following gaps which are evident:
    1. Lack of S&T specialists in State S&T councils: State S&T councils are usually managed by administrative staff/generalists & not scientists/community practitioners. There are a some civil society collectives (such as Honeybee.org[28]) which have been involved in various state S&T councils.
    2. State S&T councils are perennially underfunded. NITI Aayog’s 2025 Report on Strengthening State S&T Councils shows that only Kerala (₹173.34 Cr), Gujarat (₹160 Cr), UP (₹139.09 Cr) & Haryana (₹129.79 Cr)’s councils had a budget of over ₹100 Cr in FY24-25. This funding crunch affects everything, including hiring, fundraising & industry-academia linkages.
    3. Most of the funding being done even at the State S&T level is for R&D[29].It is tough to say how many citizen funded programs and policies are active, whether there is any thinking behind how they operate and view/measure their impact.
    4. This leaves a massive gap for citizen/civil society-led S&T communication/popularization/experimentation efforts. However, these are very few & far in between. I am making a list of a few such active collectives which I can find, which I will share as an addendum to this document.
    5. For efforts to effectively create software for the UPMS, Vigyan Nidhi, National Research Repository, there is remarkably less information available on how FOSS, decentralized, interoperable and consent-based these softwares will be. The core technical backend will likely be built at NIC[30], DIC, National e-Gov Division, and the academic metadata & repository will come from INFLIBNET Centre.
  5. These create the following opportunities for our ecosystem:
    1. Research
      1. Building a map/landscape of citizen/civil society-led S&T communication/popularization/experimentation/community efforts. Just building this repository would be very useful for academic institutions, state S&T councils and civil society folks.
      2. Building a map/landscape of private basic research labs/R&D centres across private institutions, research organizations.
      3. A long term community study on receipts & expenditures of State S&T councils for the 31 states and UTs[31] where they exist. This financial data could then be mapped to scheme wise & project wise expenditure data, giving a clear picture of what amount of state public money is spent per year on what projects[32]. This could create a useful repository of each state’s S&T policies by what it funds.
      4. A long term research on how much India spends on scientific software procurement & access across R&D centres/academic institutes per year. There is currently very little to no literature on this crucial dependence on foreign software that India has.
    2. Policy engagement
      1. Creating decentralized platforms for meaningful engagement around citizen science & basic research/experimentation with research & academic institutions which can provide systems of knowledge, research & meaningful social exchange.
      2. Opportunities for strategic engagement with NITI Aayog to incorporate PDGI principles into the design and development of major digital infrastructure initiatives, such as Vigyan Nidhi and the National Research Repository.

Footnotes

  1. Peter Hall further divided policy changes into 3 tiers, being first-order (instrumental change), second-order (introduction of new instruments into the same framework) & third-order (paradigm shift of policy). ↩︎

  2. I have used italics for in-text comments which I am making, and footnotes otherwise. ↩︎

  3. FAST India, India's Journey Towards a Top 3 S&T Nation, 2023, pages 14-15 ↩︎

  4. Persistent problem, covered as far back as Economic Survey 2017-18 ↩︎

  5. Covered in ANRF bill, 2023 ↩︎

  6. Covered in FAST's EODS Report. Under MeitY Secy Mr. S Krishnan, a 2023 secretary-level project was held to find duplicacy of budget line expenses of schemes/projects within MeitY & across ministries. TCF was one of the project partners. ↩︎

  7. PRS Demand for Grants 2021-22 Analysis, Science and Technology, p. 6. ↩︎

  8. FAST India’s Research Support Functionalities Survey, 2023, p. 11. ↩︎ ↩︎

  9. FAST India’s Ease of Doing Science Index, 2023, p. 28. ↩︎ ↩︎

  10. FAST India’s Ease of Doing Science Index, 2023, p. 32. ↩︎ ↩︎

  11. FAST India’s Ease of Doing Science Index, 2023, p. 14. ↩︎

  12. FAST India’s Ingredients of a Robust Research Ecosystem, 2023, p. 11. ↩︎

  13. FAST India’s State of Science Survey, 2024, p. 12. ↩︎ ↩︎

  14. Covered in Draft National Deep Tech Startup Policy 2023 ↩︎

  15. FAST India’s Research Support Functionalities Survey, 2023, p. 8. ↩︎

  16. Nazim M, Bhardwaj RK, Agrawal A, Bano A (2023), "Open access publishing in India: trends and policy perspectives". Global Knowledge, Memory and Communication, Vol. 72 No. 4-5 pp. 437–451, doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/GKMC-09-2021-0158 ↩︎

  17. Mentioned in NEP 2020, ANRF 2023, STIP 2020 ↩︎

  18. Policy orgs such as CTIER have been arguing for this since at least 2023. ↩︎

  19. Rather strange that this policy is arguing for making the TRL scale a standard now, as it is a global standard since at least the 1970s, and is already adopted by most funding bodies in India. But as I understand this is to standardize TRL scales along different sectors rather than adopting it as a standard as a whole. ↩︎

  20. Primary recommendation in CTIER's 2023 comments on the Draft National Deep Tech Startup Policy (NDTSP) ↩︎

  21. While this centralizing/linking policy suggestion has been abound since at least 2020, this particular instance of an Inter-Ministerial Board linking different nodes of a domain was officially proposed in the National Startup Policy 2023 Draft and has been put in effect under Startup India from Feb 2026 onwards. ↩︎

  22. CTIER's 2023 comments on the Draft National Deep Tech Startup Policy (NDTSP) ↩︎

  23. This report recommends to Strengthen NIF, point 3.6 (c). ↩︎

  24. For all the centralization, they're letting NISPG operate under DST as an autonomous institution. This does show a more long term vision for NISPG rather than a mission-driven body which would operate under the PMO/alongside Office of the PSA. ↩︎

  25. Interestingly, both NISTEP & STEPI follow the East Asian model of having a centralized policy-making, directional agency rather than the decentralized approach favoured by the UK's UKRI & US' NSF. I suppose it makes some sense as India's lack of grassroots innovation capabilities will make it choose to optimize whatever capabilities it has. ↩︎

  26. It had one of the cooler government logos. ↩︎

  27. Kanhare, D., Arjunwadkar, M., Vichare, A., "Rise and Decline of India’s State University System: Neglect, Design, or Neglect by Design?", 2009. ↩︎

  28. Though it doesn’t seem to be active since 2022. ↩︎

  29. I couldn’t crunch the numbers for this, since most state S&T committees don’t have audited financial records publicly available. We will have to file RTIs for that. KSCSTE has annual reports, which I went through & found that most of the funding received is classified as R&D. GUJCOST has a good website, but doesn’t have annual reports/audited financial documents. ↩︎

  30. Couldn’t link the URL as it is in Hindi: https://एनआईसी.सरकार.भारत/ ↩︎

  31. V.K. Saraswat; Vivek Kumar Singh; Ashok Sonkusare; Thyagaraju B.M.; Naba Suroor; Simarjot Kaur (2025), A Roadmap for Strengthening State S&T Council, Empowering State S&T Council, NITI Aayog Report, page 4: List of all State S&T Councils. ↩︎

  32. I do think that done statewise, most of this data would already exist and would just need to be put together as a project. ↩︎