The US Department of Energy-funded Fermi labs has urged us to participate in the designing and building of the giant nuclear particle accelerator, the International Linear Collider (ILC) (Indian Express, March 13). This raises important issues of science policy.

The project is expected to cost $8 billion (around Rs 36,000 crore) over a seven-year period (2010-17). What’s more, the proposal that we participate, technically and financially, in ILC follows close on the heels of the government agreeing to do likewise in the International Thermonuclear Reactor (ITER), with a financial contribution of US$1 billion per year over roughly the same period as the ILC. Taken together this will amount to around Rs 8,000 crore a year over 2010-20. All this is for research in one field —atomic energy. And this when applied research of direct benefit to our society and economy, such as medical research and meteorology, gets a pittance. The annual budget of the Indian Council of Medicatix Research is only around Rs 120 crore a year; and that of the key area of meteorology — serviced by the India Meteorological Department and the Medium Range Weather Forecasting Centre — get only around Rs 200 crore a year.

We should be ashamed of these figures. Tragically, in the medical sector, we are still using technologies for mass diseases like measles, cholera and typhoid which have a vintage of 50 years. Imagine what ‘one shot vaccines’ against these diseases could do to the health of millions. Even in the much hyped area of bio-technology, our annual investment in R&D, training and technical infrastructure, is not more than Rs 200 crore a year. Further, our genuine manufacturing base is small and most of the turnover of the BT ‘industry’ consists of imported products, except probably in the area of diagnostic kits and a few other products.

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