Of the four Indians to win the Nobel Prize in science, only one, C V Raman, was awarded for research work done in his own country. Hargobind Khurana, S Chandrashekhar and our newest entrant to the exclusive Nobel Prize club, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, have all been honoured for research at foreign institutions.

Asked whether the type of breakthrough he made on decoding cell proteins would have been possible if he had remained in India, Ramakrishnan acknowledged that research in India was lagging behind by some 20 years. His colleagues in India had to fly to Japan for getting X-ray sources. He advocated a long term policy, if we wanted to produce quality research in India.

Some years back, there was an interesting letter in ‘Currrent Science’ by a science professor and researcher from Punjab, H S Virk, which put in perspective the rapid decline of cutting edge scientific research in our country. Using the Science Citation Index of the Institute for Scientific Information, Virk cited a survey which placed India in 8th place in the top 20 countries undertaking scientific research in the 1980s. In the 1990s, we were down to the 12th position, and today India is no longer in the list of the top 20.

India ranks 21st in terms of output of research papers in science, but 119th in terms of research papers of any worthwhile contribution. The number of R&D scientists and engineers per million of the population is 157 in India. This is one fifth the ratio in South Korea, and one thirtieth the ratio of countries like the USA and Japan. We have 17 per cent of the global population but account for a mere 1.5 per cent of the global output in R&D.

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