Budget 2024-25: Bid to operationalise ANRF could end up being a wasted effort

On July 23, 2024, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, during her Union Budget speech for the fiscal year 2024-25, announced that the Centre will finally operationalise the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), five years after its initial announcement.

The foundation, established under the ANRF Act, 2023, was designed to fund, coordinate and promote research. “We will operationalise the ANRF for basic research and prototype development,” the minister said in her budget speech.

ANRF was allocated Rs 2,000 crore this time; the same as last year. However, the revised budget for 2023-2024 brought down the allocation to Rs 258.6 crore. The foundation will receive Rs 50,000 crore over five years, 72 per cent of which would come from private sources.  

In July 2024, the principal scientific advisor to the Government of India announced members of two key committees, attracting criticism. These include the 15-member Governing Board, which aims to provide high-level strategic direction as well as perform and monitor the implementation of the objectives of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation established with the ANRF Act, 2023 and the 16-member executive council, responsible for implementing the provisions of this Act.

Worrisome wording

The statement by finance minister Sitharaman about operationalising the ANRF Fund for basic research and prototype development is vague. The government should come up with a clear explanation of what they mean.

The government notes that the ANRF seeks to regulate all research and development in the fields of natural sciences establishments in India. The usage of the word ‘regulate’ is worrisome because its literary meaning is “to control something by using laws or rules”. The ideal word should have been “encourage” rather than “regulate”.

Research in India is already hindered by too much bureaucracy, undesirable regulations and rules. Institutes have lost their power to make their own decisions. For example, if a researcher wants to buy equipment, they will have to place the order from a government-sponsored e-market and then wait for 20 or 30 days to get a reply on whether they have the equipment. And if they do not have it, they would have to take the government’s permission to buy it from abroad. To initiate international collaborations, one has to write to the science department at the Centre for permission and the paperwork will take more than a year to know the final decision. All of this takes a lot of time. I also hear from other scientists that they do not get funds for months and that they are frustrated. The story is the same for people who are working as research scholars. Many institutes are struggling to get PhD scholars as there is less interest among students to pursue research careers and those who are interested, prefer to go abroad. After looking at the recent notification by the government, announcing members of the governing body and executive council, I do not get any indication that the ANRF is likely to be less bureaucratic and will release funds on time. All travel reservations related to project work are routed through government-specified agencies, often spending more money from limited project funds.

The governing board consists of secretaries from various departments in the Indian government and that is again really concerning because ANRF needs to have more autonomy. With the inclusion of senior bureaucrats, I am not very sure about how this is going to play out.

Then, the government expects private enterprises or entrepreneurs to provide over 70 per cent of the funding. I am not sure how they are going to raise this money. The government is trying to reduce its role in funding and expects private entrepreneurship to provide funding. The question is whether this is the right way of doing it. If you look at the history of the so-called big monopolies in India, you do not find many of them funding research, unlike in the US, which has a lot of foundations funded by many billionaires. India does not have that tradition, with the exemption of the Tatas.

Developing that tradition would require a lot of effort and will be time-consuming. The ANRF was created to prioritise research facilities in universities and colleges. Most of India’s 40,000 higher education centres are run by the states and they have very limited funding opportunities. The state establishments get only about 11 per cent of the funds provided by the Department of Science and Technology and 65 per cent of funding goes to Indian Institute of Technologies under the Union Government. The ANRF wants to change this disparity, but what would be the mechanism to solve it?

You cannot expect colleges and universities spread throughout the country to compete with research institutions for private money. How do colleges and universities compete with premier institutes for funding? I am a bit confused about it. I do not see anything in their announcement about this. We need a separate mechanism for state and central universities. If we put them in the same basket as other premium institutions, we may not be able to make reforms and help our universities. Elitism will continue further because you can see that even the constitution of the committee contains no proper representation of the Indian academic circles or universities.

If you look at the committees, the prime minister is the president of the Governing Body. It has ministers from all ministries. Then, you have secretaries. They have Manjul Bhargava, professor at Princeton University in the US, a mathematician who is well known for his work. They have a scientist Subra Suresh, professor at Brown University, who was previously the director of the US National Science Foundation during the Barack Obama Administration. There is nothing wrong with them being a part of the bodies; it may even be beneficial. But again, the question is why they do not have academics from India in these committees, apart from the Indian Institute of Science and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

ANRF needs a proper representation from the Indian academic field, and independent observers known for their contributions, as members. Having the same group of bureaucrats from the ministries does not help. That is not what we are looking forward to in such a kind of a setup.

The declared objective of the ANRF is to fund research in the area of natural sciences — that involves the understanding and prediction of natural phenomena based on empirical evidence and experimentation. I believe that the role of government is important here. You cannot expect the private sector to fund curiosity-driven science because they would not invest money unless they find some application. With curiosity-driven or basic science, you may not find any application at all in the initial stages. This science is driven by trying to understand the world through scientific tools.

This needs to be encouraged mostly through public funding. My concern is whether the ANRF will support basic research when the Act says it is interested only in supporting research “that makes a tangible impact on society”.

Wasted effort

The government is fundamentally changing this funding model because I think their outlook favours translational research that may have technological applications. But that is not the way the science is being conducted globally. Basic research may find some application sometime probably in the future. But when you are trying to review a research proposal in basic science, what you seek is the proposer’s ability to acquire knowledge about the problem that is defined by conducting observations, experimentation and analyses. The application part of the result may not be apparent in the initial stage. A generally accepted working definition of basic scientific research reads like this: “the pursuit of knowledge in order to understand a natural process irrespective of the potential applications that might arise from such knowledge”.

Although India is in the league of the top 10 by gross domestic product (GDP), the ratio of public funding for science research in India has been 0.6 to 0.7 per cent of GDP for the last decade. Even a small country like South Korea spends about two to three per cent of its GDP. If the government does not intend to come up with more allocation, the new setup would be a wasted effort.

CP Rajendran is an adjunct professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru

Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth