The Editorial Analysis- The Coming 75 Years

Table of Contents

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- An outdated appraisal system.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