India’s science problem is not talent, but priorities

The Nobel Prize should not be the target. Building a research system capable of producing Nobel-level discoveries should be.

3 min readOct 13, 2026 06:20 AM IST First published on: Oct 13, 2026 at 06:20 AM IST

Every October, the Nobel announcements trigger a familiar conversation in India: Why does India, with its enormous pool of scientific talent, rarely feature among them? Perhaps the more useful question is: What are the countries that produce transformative science doing differently and what holds our scientists back?

The answer is not simply money, though money matters. The US spends about 3.4 per cent of GDP on research and development, Germany over 3 per cent, Japan more than 3.5 per cent and South Korea over 5 per cent. China is approaching 2.7 per cent. India’s gross expenditure on R&D is only about 0.64 per cent.

But the more revealing statistic is who funds research. In India, business contributes around 40 per cent of R&D expenditure, compared with roughly three-quarters in the US and China. Our research ecosystem therefore has both a scale and a private-sector participation gap. There is also increasing pressure on scientists to “develop technologies”, “build products”, “commercialise research” and “deliver solutions”. These are legitimate national priorities but technology cannot be produced on demand. We are emphasising the last few stages while underinvesting in the first.

A diagnostic platform, for example, may require years of work on disease biology, pathogen behaviour, host response, biomarkers and molecular mechanisms before a product becomes possible. Basic science is the landscape from which innovation emerges. This is where India needs a rethink. First, government and research agencies should create a protected basic-science funding window. A defined proportion of competitive funding should support investigator-driven, curiosity-led research, without requiring every project to promise a patent, product or technology. Second, research funding should be explicitly divided into discovery, translation and deployment portfolios, with different timelines and success metrics. Third, India needs long-duration funding, with rigorous scientific review but considerably less administrative micromanagement. Fourth, we need a national shared research infrastructure. Genomics, proteomics, advanced imaging, biobanks, structural biology, AI and computational platforms should be accessible across institutions.

Finally, we must change how we see research and evaluate scientists. Publication counts, journal impact factors, patents and grant utilisation are convenient metrics, but they do not necessarily measure discovery. Scientific assessment should reward originality, reproducibility, important questions, new knowledge, datasets, platforms, technologies and influence on science or health policy. This means building the pipeline properly.

China offers an instructive example. As its overall R&D investment has grown, it has become a major global supplier of affordable technology. China produced around 80 per cent of the world’s solar PV modules and battery cells in 2024, while its share of global electric-car production reached about 70 per cent in 2025. The lesson is to recognise the importance of connecting discovery to engineering, manufacturing and markets.

India has an extraordinary natural advantage. Our population provides a vast and diverse setting for research. The ambition should therefore be to create an ecosystem which attracts young scientists who can pursue an unconventional question for 10 or 15 years, fail, change direction and try again without being penalised for not producing an immediate product. If India wants the technologies of tomorrow, it must fund the science of today. The Nobel Prize should not be the target. Building a research system capable of producing Nobel-level discoveries should be.

The writer is senior scientist and programme officer, AMR, ICMR