DesiPundit

Over at nanopolitan, Abi, citing figures from the Union Budget 2007, argues for enhanced government support for academic R&D.

If you focus your attention on support for academic research at universities, well, you will have to focus hard. While it’s not a needle in a haystack, it’s still pretty meager. DST offers about Rs. 350 crores through SERC and another 150 crores through the nano-mission, and DBT offers about 200 to 300 crores. Even if you add the support for extramural research from other S&T related ministries (which typically is less than 5 percent of their total budgets), the total academic research support would still be less than 2000 crores — or about 450 million US dollars. Remember, this is a very generous estimate. To put this number in perspective, it’s about one-and-a-half million dollars per university!

The Acorn responds,

The more bucks for more bang argument is true to a certain degree, and modern research requires high upfront investment. Yet the question that needs to be asked is not whether the government can allocate more funds for R&D (it probably can’t), but rather what is it doing to incent the private sector to invest in R&D work?

Bongop’o'ndit argues that while funding needs to be increased, proper utilization is equally important.

Secondly, it is not just lack of money, but proper distribution and usage. Certain institutes, laboratories and even researchers use political connections to usurp a lion’s share of the funding and then misutilize such funds. Speaking from personal experience, I have seen dust gathering on biomedical instruments that are supposed to be “National Facilities� with the principal investigator diverting funds for its upkeep to their own research. In some cases, scientists even appropriate money or resources such as PCs for personal use. Even worse, it seems like some of the budgeted funds were never even utilized.