The Coming 75 Years- Relevance for UPSC Exam
- GS Paper 1: Indian History- Modern Indian history from about the middle of the eighteenth century until the present- significant events, personalities, issues.
The Coming 75 Years in News
- As India celebrates 75 years of Independence, it is apt to imagine what the next 75 years will look like.
- Can our nation, obsessed with politics, Bollywood, and cricket, aspire to make the next 75 years an enviable era with a higher standard of living for every citizen?
Associated Concerns with S & T in India
- Poor Investment in S&T: India spends a meagre 0.7% of its GDP on research and development (R&D).
- On the other hand, Israel and South Korea are prime examples that drive their respective economies by spending nearly 5% of their GDP on R&D.
- Inefficient Implementation: Although there is a well-defined system to disburse research grants to scientists through their institutions, it is mired in inefficiencies.
- Other Key Challenges faced by Scientific Community in India:
- Inadequate staffing at funding agencies,
- Lack of transparency in fund disbursal,
- Lack of a rigorous international standard review and feedback process,
- Excessive delay in fund disbursal, and
- An outdated appraisal system.
The Coming 75 Years- Making India Scientific Power
India needs a shift in focus to science and technology. Following steps can be taken to make India a Scientific Superpower in next 75 years-
- Increasing the R&D budget to 4% of the nation’s GDP: spending 4% of the national GDP on R&D is required to drive science and innovation.
- However, an increase in the science budget to innovate must precede appropriate macro-level policy changes on how and where the money needs to be spent.
- A part of this increase needs to be earmarked for building physical and intellectual infrastructure across the country, especially in the universities.
- A first-class infrastructure must be accompanied by well-trained, globally competitive institutional administrators and processes.
- India cannot compete on a global stage unless the dwindling infrastructure of its universities is upgraded.
- Ensuring that individual institutions implement processes to accommodate the large budget: before any policy changes take effect, individual institutions must implement processes to accommodate the large budget.
- This requires standardising procedures across institutions and borrowing the best practices from some global counterparts.
- For example, when the government encourages public-private partnerships, each grant-receiving institution must have internal procedures to handle their scientists’ requests to facilitate effective academia-industry collaboration.
- Bring and implement best practices from the industry and some of the best-run science grant administrations abroad.
- The involvement of the IT major, Tata Consulting Services, and technology use in transforming passport services across the globe gives us hope.
- Encouraging individual entrepreneurs and Linking science with society: it is time to bring the fruits of science and technology closer to the masses.
- There is no better way to do this than by promoting and facilitating individual entrepreneurs.
- This has received increased attention from the government with many positive policy changes.
- Lab to Land Implementation: There are no better cradles for creative ideas than our university labs.
- A robust system to link the labs with the entrepreneurs to funnel innovative ideas, products, and solutions to our society needs to be in place.
- To make this happen, the universities must encourage scientists to innovate and place standardised procedures to take ideas out of labs.
- Entrepreneurship will only succeed in India if it is backed by a funnel of ideas and a liberal process of taking those ideas out of our university labs.
The Editorial Analysis- A Tryst with the Past
Conclusion
- India must realise that the next generation of war is economic, not military, and only a science and technology-driven economy can prepare us for that.
PM Address from Red Fort on 76th Independence Day