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.

Then there is the important area of energy from non-conventional sources, like wind energy, where our proven potential is large — 45,000 to 50,000 MW —but where our national R&D effort is pitifully inadequate. The potential of solar energy has hardly been tapped. Even in our “core of core economic activity” — agriculture — the financial outlay on ICAR and the state agricultural universities is only 10 per cent of our total S&T budget.

Much has been said, particularly during the recent visit of US President Bush, about possible India-US collaboration in the key area of clean coal technology, leading finally to what Bush called zero greenhouse gas emitting coal-fired thermal power stations. Fed up with losing a whole decade in trying to get the ministry of power and the department of science and technology to financially support them, our two leading public sector companies, BHEL and NTPC, have fortunately had the foresight to raise the money themselves for designing, engineering, constructing and operating a 100 MW clean coal thermal power plant based on the integrated gassification combined cycle (IGCC) technology at Dadri near Delhi. What is the financial outlay involved in such a plant? A piffling Rs 600 crore over a five-year period. Should such projects not be the first priority when it comes to our scarce R&D resources?

Taking a somewhat broader view, it is not widely known that taken together the R&D budgets of the Defence R&D Organisation, ISRO and the Department of Atomic Energy constitute as much as 40 per cent of total R&D investment. Again this percentage has remained practically constant for almost a decade. Many of the programmes in these three agencies have long merited a national re-appraisal. For instance, what national priority should be accorded to the Rs 350 crore Chandrayan project involving a PSLV rocket of ISRO carrying an instrumented payload to study the reverse side of the moon? It was never considered by the Planning Commission, or various scientific advisory committees, from an inter se priority perspective, which is what policy making and planning is all about.

There is a compelling and urgent need to take a relook at our participation in the ILC project, as its objectives and outputs are entirely of the basic research kind, which a desperately poor country like ours can ill afford and whose outputs we can draw on from the pool of world knowledge. Our involvement in ITER, however, should — if we get really involved in it and secure considerable technical skills, experience and technical documentation pertaining to thermonuclear fusion reactors — give us an insurance on a potentially inexhaustible energy source, albeit in the 2030-2040 time-frame.

The writer was science advisor to Indira Gandhi when she was PM, and secretary of various scientific departments