China bankrolls R&D while India plays
the miser
Jan 9, 2012, 12.42AM IST TNN [ Nitin Sethi ]
NEW DELHI: Did Prime Minister Manmohan Singh underplay China's
superiority over India in the field of science, research and technology?
Analysis of new data shared at the
National Science Congress shows that China has been far ahead of India for a
decade and the wide gap between the two has only deepened over past years. India published a mere 233,027 scientific papers in 2010 compared to 969,315 research articles by China.
This is data from Elsevier, one the biggest publishers of scientific research in the world. China recorded a 22.83% growth in publishing scientific research compared to 14.27% by Indian researchers. Elsevier data shows that Chinese scientists are also much more up to date than the Indian scientific community. On an index of state of art science, China was placed at 0.86 with India coming on the negative end of the scale at -2.48 though the citation levels (how many other researchers read the papers) was higher for India than China on average.
The publishing giant also looked at areas of competencies or quality research and again came up with the vast difference between the two. India had 159 areas of competencies in different scientific fields while China had 885 such areas. While India is publishing more in chemistry. engineering, biology and biotech, China is publishing a lot more in computer
sciences, medical specialties, mathematics, physics and health sciences.
The vast difference between the two is not just in published science but also patenting of technology -- taking pure sciences forward into applications. China patents five times more than India for every billion dollars of GDP and the growth in registering new patents has risen rapidly over past five years. In 2005, China had filed 93,485 patents and this galloped to 153,060 in 2007.
There is a reason why India is nowhere
close to the Chinese scientific behemoth
-- Indian government doesn't invest half
as much as the Chinese state does in
scientific research and development and
the distance between the two is widening. China is going to target
investing 3% of its GDP into scientific
endeavours by 2020 while India is still
'aspiring' to ramp it up from the current
0.9% to 2% by 2017.
Percentages, however, do not tell the
whole story. China's GDP is $6,980 billion
as per IMF compared to India's $1,843
billion. China investing about 2.5% of its
GDP last year in S&T works out to $174
billion compared to India's 0.9% which works out to roughly $16.5 billion. By Indian government's own admission,
even a decade ago in 2002-03, China had 8.5 lakh researchers producing 40,000 PhD theses in sciences compared to
India's 1.5 lakh people producing about
1,000 PhD theses in R&D.
The route both countries have taken to enhance their prowess in the world of science is also different. While China invests heavily through state-run scientific institutions, it also pulls in a large amount of private investment from outside. It has nearly 100 international research facilities that have come up
since 2003. India's public investment in R&D has, in comparison, gone down with time and has been unable to attract partnerships with the private sector as well. The PM indicated in his speech at Bhubaneswar on Tuesday that he would seek to increase the share of private investment in S&T (an oft repeated comment) but that may not be easy unless the state is ready to put its own money in this long gestation, high risk investment.
In the end, what former President A P J
Abdul Kalam advised students at the
Science Congress on Wednesday may
make more sense than competing with
China: ''do your own thing''.
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