Editorial 1 : National Research Foundation approved State of science: Where India lags
Recent context:
- Recently, government’s approval for a National Research Foundation (NRF) is being widely welcomed by the scientific community.
- The NRF has the potential to, single-handedly, address a whole range of deficiencies in India’s scientific research sector that have been flagged for years.
- India has a huge pool of science and engineering graduates, a large network of laboratories and research institutions, and active involvement in some of the frontline areas of scientific research.
- It puts India among the leading countries with deep scientific abilities. However, in comparative terms, India lags behind several countries, some with much more limited resources, on a variety of research indicators.
Expenditure on R&D
- Primary among these is the money India spends on research and development activities.
- For more than two decades now, the Centre’s stated objective has been to allocate at least two per cent of the national GDP on R&D.
- Not only has this objective not been met, the expenditure on research as a proportion of GDP has gone down, from about 0.8 per cent at the start of this millennium to about 0.65 per cent now. For the last decade or so, this share has remained stagnant.
- However, this does not mean that money for research has not increased. The spending on research has more than tripled in the last 15 years, from Rs 39,437 crore in 2007-08 to over 1.27 lakh crore in 2020-21. But India’s GDP has grown faster, and so the share of research has gone down.
- According to the 2021 UNESCO Science Report, at least 37 countries spent more than 1 per cent of their GDP on R&D in 2018, the last year for which data from all countries is available. Fifteen of these spent two per cent or more.
- Globally, about 1.79 per cent of (world) GDP is spent on R&D activities. Unlike India, at the global level, growth in R&D expenditure has outpaced GDP growth
- In response to a Parliament question in March, the government said India’s total expenditure on R&D in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms in 2018 about US$ 68 billion —was the sixth highest in the world, after the US, China, Japan, Germany and South Korea. However, India was far behind. The US and China both spent more than US$ 500 billion that year
- Moreover, women comprise only 18 per cent of total scientific researchers in India, while globally this number was 33 per cent.
Research in universities
- India has nearly 40,000 institutions of higher education, mostly colleges.
- According to the detailed project report on NRF, Only one per cent of these engage in active research on the other hand in most leading countries, universities are the centres of research and development activities. So, the NRF concept puts a great amount of emphasis on rectifying this
- According to the Department of Science and Technology (DST), there were 7,888 R&D institutions in the country in 2021, including more than 5,200 units in the private sector and industries, which engage mainly in industry-specific research. The count of private sector units even includes 921 industries “with potential” to undertake research activities.
Research output
- India produced 25,550 doctorates in 2020-21, of which 14,983 were in science and engineering disciplines.
- This 59 per cent proportion in the overall doctorates compares well with other countries, putting India in the seventh rank overall.
- Even in absolute terms, India’s annual output of science and engineering doctorates is right at the top, with only the US, China and the United Kingdom producing more.
- But because of India’s large population, this is not impressive in proportional terms. In fact, the number of researchers per million population in India, 262, is extremely low compared with even developing countries like Brazil (888), South Africa (484) or Mexico (349).
Publications and patents
- Data from DST showed that Indian researchers published 149,213 articles in science and engineering journals across the world in 2020, almost two and a half times more than a decade earlier.
- However, it still constituted only 5 per cent of all the articles. Chinese researchers contributed 23 per cent, while US researchers accounted for 15.5 per cent.
Conclusion:
- Therefore, National Research Foundation (NRF) with the stated aim to seed, grow and promote research and development (R&D) is expected to foster a culture of research and innovation throughout India’s universities, colleges, research institutions, and R&D laboratories
Editorial 2: Move over SCO and BRICS: swing states are set to take precedence
Recent Context:
- Recently Goldman Sachs, the global investment bank talked about new idea “swing states” that will shape the global balance of power.
- Unlike BRICS and SCO, whose salience can only dim in the Indian strategic calculus, “swing states” are beginning to loom larger in India’s strategic priorities.
Historical idea of BRICS and SCO:
- The concept of BRICs; Brazil, Russia, India, and China was about Goldman Sachs drawing investor attention to the economic potential of the four nations at the turn of the millennium.
- Like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation that was formed in 2001, the idea of the BRICS was a simple one to limit American power in the unipolar moment of the 1990s.
- If the ambition of the BRICS was global, the focus of the SCO was regional to keep the US and its “colour revolutions” out of the shared inner Asian periphery of Russia and China.
- The “Shanghai Five” was convened by Russia and China in 1996 along with three central Asian states — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan — three former Soviet Republics that shared borders with China.
- Formally set up in 2006, the four initial members of the BRICs forum welcomed South Africa into their ranks in 2010 to make it BRICS. Both the SCO and the BRICS are now debating the expansion of their membership as the worldwide interest in them grows. Notwithstanding the ambitious plans for their expansion, the SCO and BRICS are running out of their geopolitical steam as the context that brought them together at the turn of the millennium no longer exists.
Changing role of SCO and BRICS:
- The SCO’s core objective was to counter “external threats” from the US. Central Asia’s rulers welcomed the protection Russia and China offered against the threat of “regime change” sponsored by the West.
- After Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and the Russian nationalist claim that many former Soviet republics are “artificial states”, the source of ‘external threat’ looks different in Central Asia.
- Nor does the region seek to trade Russian hegemony for Chinese dominance. Central Asian states, instead, are looking to diversify their international relations, including with the US, Europe, Japan, Turkey, and India.
- The geopolitics of BRICS looks quite different today. China has grown far more powerful than its former peers in the forum.
- Beijing’s GDP is bigger than all the other BRICS put together. Russia has locked itself into an expensive and unwinnable conflict with the collective West even as its relative economic weight continues to decline.
- As from the Ukraine war, Moscow is now more dependent than ever before on China.
- Meanwhile, India’s contradictions with China have sharpened while those with the US are being smoothed over. India might have wanted a “multipolar world” in the 1990s, but its first preference today is a “multipolar Asia” to stop the region from becoming China’s backyard.
The new idea of “swing states”
- The idea of “swing states” could endure because it is less ideological.
- It is rooted in the structural condition of the international system the emergence of several nations, big or small, with significant resources, capacities, or location, to influence geopolitical outcomes.
- The idea had begun to gain prominence in the early 21st century as analysts focused on several “pivotal states” that could make a difference to the global distribution of power.
Types of ‘Swing states and their role”
- The report identifies four kinds of swing states.
- Countries that can dominate “critical components of the world’s supply chain”;
- states that can “capitalise on current trends toward near-shoring, off-shoring, and friend-shoring”;
- Nations with “disproportionate amount of capital and willingness to deploy it around the world in pursuit of strategic objectives”, and
- Countries that can bring global leadership to critical issues.
- Therefore, according to the report published by Goldman Sachs,
- “Geopolitical swing states are critical to the world economy and balance of power, but they don’t have the capacity by themselves to drive the global agenda, at least for now”.
- “As long as the tensions between the US and China continue to get worse” the swing states “will have outsised abilities to navigate geopolitical competition and take advantage of and influence it”.
Conclusion:
- As global capital relearns the logic of geopolitics, the world’s political leaders are paying greater attention to “geoeconomics”.
- India while continues to sit in SCO and BRICS, India is growing bilateral engagement with key swing states — in resource-rich Africa, capital-rich Gulf, and technology-rich Europe is likely to be far more consequential for India’s rise.