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Vol.
XXVIII No. 50
December
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Scientific
Capability And The Wealth Of Nations
Prabir
Purkayastha
EVERY
school of thought accepts that if a country wants to become a global player,
Research and Development (R&D) is vital. Copying, body shopping, selling
other peoples products and technology can work for some time. But not for
long. The ability to develop technology innovations continuously is what
distinguishes technology leaders from followers. This means the ability not
merely to copy innovations done elsewhere but to also to develop the next
generation of technology. Just following behind the Joneses may have worked in a
world where technology remained relatively stable. But not today, where
computational power of a chip doubles every 18 months.
SCIENTIFIC
CAPABILITY
Scientific
capability and technology innovations are therefore the prerequisites to a
countrys development. In a recent paper, David King The
Scientific Impact of Nations,
Nature,
VOL 430, July 15, 2004) has
plotted the scientific capability (citation index intensity) of a nation against
the GDP intensity (per capita GDP) of 31 nations. The citation intensity is
simply the number of such citations divided by the GDP of the countries. The
wealth intensity of the countries is also a simple measurement: it is the per
capita GDP of the country. It shows very clearly the importance of scientific
capability for a nation: the citation intensity correlates very well with the
wealth intensity of countries. More the citation intensity, wealthier the
country. Of course, one can also argue that if a country is wealthy, it can
devote more to research and therefore its citation index goes up. But if we look
at the per capita GDP of many countries, for instance oil-producing countries,
we will find that though their GDP is high, their scientific output is low. If
we exclude the countries that are rich due to some primary product or a finite
natural resource like oil, then the driving factor for wealth of a country does
emerge as its capability to produce scientific and technological innovation
While
how to measure scientific capability is still being debated, some indicators are
agreed upon as a basis for some form of ranking. The most common ones are amount
of research papers produced and how many times they are cited by other authors:
the citation index of the papers. While the number of papers that a country
produces, may provide an indication of the quantity of its output, the citation
index is supposed to reflect its quality. It is true that a simple analysis
based on just citations is open to various distortions papers in medicines
are quoted more than papers in mathematics, papers in English are quoted more
than in other languages, etc, nevertheless, the citation index does provide
a rough and ready reckoner for quality of the research produced by a country.
How
does India fare on this measure of citation index and citation intensity? The
good news is that India and also China are still in the league of countries with
significant science and technology capability. The bad news is that our quality
is well below its quantity. The citation rate per paper puts us in the 29th
position, well below that of countries such as Luxemburg, Israel, Singapore. For
all publications in the time period 1997-2001, India had 2.13 per cent of all
publications but a citation index of only 0.86 per cent. Countries at the top
end have a reverse ratio; with a smaller number of papers, they have a higher
citation index.
CITATION
INDEX
Citation
index is what King has used is one measure of scientific capability. There are
others, which have been constructed. One of the better known one is the one by
the Institute for Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) in
China. SHTU recently carried out an
exercise to rank the world’s universities, using an index of five criteria: the
number of people who won a Nobel Prize (or Fields medal, its equivalent in
mathematics), the number of highly cited researchers, articles published by
university staff in the leading science journals Science
and Nature, the number of articles
included in the Science Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index and the
average academic output of a faculty member. One can question the weightage and
the methodology: after all Nobel prizes are given long after the people have
done their actual work. However, even if one takes the ranking, not at its face
value but just an indicator of broad trends, the picture that emerges for India
is not very flattering.
Amongst
the first 500 top universities in the world, India has only 3. Even worse, there
are only 3 universities from India in the top 100 Asia/Pacific universities. In
2003, the three universities/institutes were Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc.),
Bangalore, IIT Kharagpur and IIT Delhi; this year it is IISc and Calcutta
University. To quote the editor of Current Science, P. Balaram, Sadly,
the real universities in India are limping, research consigned to an unimportant
role. Even as funding has increased for many of UGCs five star
universities there are evident problems, with faculty disinterested in research
clearly outnumbering those with an academic bent of mind. (Current
Science, VOL. 86, NO. 10, May 25 2004). This only reinforces what we have
already noted, that Indian science is producing poor quality research, with its
universities currently in decline. Even the specialised institutes that are
supposed to have concentrated on research have yet to make their mark
internationally. And if our institutes of higher learning do not deliver on
building the right kind of skills, we cannot deliver innovation to the industry
as well.
DECLINE
OF THE
UNIVERSITIES
The
decline of the universities has taken place in a number of ways. The key has
been the UGC denying funds to the university. While funds for the universities
have declined, a number of newer institutes have sprung up, which are cornering
the bulk of the funding for higher education. While this is a worldwide trend,
the degree to which the top universities of India are being denied funds is
perhaps unparalleled elsewhere. Even worse, there is a theory that while school
education could be supported, the state should get out of funding higher
education: the students should pay the true cost of higher education, reserving
this only for the rich. The obvious connection is lost sight of between
scientific capability and the wealth of nations. We need our best and brightest
to build the nations scientific capability irrespective of their income. This
is not a welfare measure but an imperative in an age where science and technical
capability spell development.
The
other issue is how do we go about building an R&D infrastructure that
delivers technology innovation to the industry? Obviously, this has not happened
in India except perhaps for three sectors, space, atomic energy and
pharmaceuticals. The first two were forced upon us due to the embargo on nuclear
and missile technologies. The pharmaceutical industry developed as changing of
the Patent Act from product to process patents allowed Indian industry to
innovate new processes and produce cheaper drugs.
In
all the three areas above, the state played the key role. In the first two
Atomic Energy and Space the research, development and production are all
carried out within the same organisation. In pharmaceuticals — CDRI, Lukhnow
and NCL, Pune — the CSIR laboratories produced the process innovations. If we
take out these three sectors, the record of the rest of the research
institutions in developing technology is quite poor.
WHY
FAILURE
Why
did the Indian research institutions fail to make contributions in other areas
while it did succeed in these three? In all the three areas, both the end user
of research, the industry, and the producer of technology, the research
institutions, worked together. Both had their contributions: if the process was
developed in the CSIR laboratories, scaling up for manufacture was done by the
industry. This is the vital gap that afflicts other sectors. If technology is
available from a collaborator, the Indian industry gets the entire package
from the design to the assembly line. Instead, if you get the same
technology from a lab, you get merely the design. Scaling it up to the
production level is a different ball game. The labs do this very poorly. If the
industry expects the laboratories to give them a completely packaged technology,
this is doomed to failure. And it is this missing link from design to
production that has lead to the research institutions contributions in other
sectors being relatively poor.
The
current paradigm of the neo-liberal economy is that the market will take care of
everything including research. Well, the market does take care of research for
little things, essentially small problems with current products and
technologies. What it cannot address is new technologies. The dominant industry
players rejected the most ubiquitous of technologies of today the personal
computers and mobile phones when they were first proposed. IBM felt that the
idea that people would want to own personal computers was ridiculous. It is
state funding of science and technology (and also philanthropic funding) for
completely esoteric ideas that produced the next generation technologies.
WHAT
IS
BE DONE
What
do we need to do in order to develop an innovative society? The most important
element here is a state funded and well-developed R&D infrastructure
including a university system that produces high quality science and technology
students. The second is the realisation in the industry that it cannot treat the
research institution like its collaborator of yesteryears. It must be itself a
partner in technology development and develop the production system for the
technology. The third is that the research institutions must understand that the
source of research ideas is the everyday world of industry. This is where the
ideas for research must originate, not from reading papers to produce another
one for journals abroad. The real world produces great ideas, the world of
journals only report them. Lastly, expecting the market to develop technology is
waiting for Godot: markets fail when it comes to research.
Hiring
out CSIR laboratories to MNCs — the Mashelkar paradigm — may help the CSIR
generate some cash; in the long term it is helping MNCs develop their next
generation of products for the global market. It will not help the Indian
economy or the Indian industry, the primary purpose for which CSIR was set up.
