The U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) recently released a 125-page policy document titled ‘Science: A New Golden Age’, which presents a renewed vision for American science. It positions itself as a sequel to the American inventor Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report, ‘Science: The Endless Frontier’, which laid the foundations of the famously successful post-war American research system.
As it happens, the new report can be consequential for the Indian science system as well — by revealing the importance of something that India currently does not have but should as quickly as possible: the ability to study its own science system with evidence. The report starts with a diagnosis well known to the science-of-science, or metascience, research community: despite sustained increases in research and development investment, returns in scientific productivity and innovation have not kept pace. But more than agreement or disagreement with this diagnosis, what matters is that a system should be able to interrogate itself using its own data and be able to reach a conclusion like this. The institutions that fund science should be accountable for the evidence that what they fund and why are actually working — and not just in the U.S. Across Europe, the U.K., China, and Japan, governments and funders are investing seriously in metascience that is able to address this concern. Governments and the people need concrete answers to how their research systems actually function: specifically, how it sets funding priorities, how funding mechanisms perform, how peer-review behaves, how it assesses researchers, how its incentives affect the way scientists collaborate, and so on.
As leadership and personnel change, experiential knowledge about what worked, what failed, and why is lost. That experience is invaluable and must remain a source of evidence — but it is also no longer sufficient considering today’s research ecosystem is far more complex than it was half a century ago, and understanding it requires systematic analysis. In India, this conversation has barely begun. Specifically, it needs to draw on economics, the sociology of science, political science, public policy, organisational studies, scientometrics, and history and philosophy. A related problem is institutional memory. India has very few publicly available analytical reports documenting the evolution of its research system, and little that carries institutional learning across successive generations of policymakers. Building that memory is itself part of building better science governance, and it is where metascience can have a significant impact. The OSTP report also called for setting clearer national scientific goals to streamline research efforts and speed up the translation of discoveries into technologies, including those for society’s benefit. And this, again, is precisely the kind of question a meaningful metascience capacity would allow India to debate with evidence rather than insights alone. But at the same time, mission-oriented research has its own record of delivery. The Apollo programme forced rapid advances in aerospace engineering, materials science, and computing that spread far beyond the space race. The Human Genome Project turned biology into a coordinated, global, infrastructure-scale enterprise. India itself had the Green Revolution, where crop-breeding research backed by state investment and clear food-security goals transformed the country’s relationship with hunger within a single generation. The Revolution has its own legitimate critics as well, regarding ecological costs, regional inequity, and long-term sustainability. But that very disagreement also makes the case for India to be able to evaluate a mission using evidence. A healthy research ecosystem may well need both approaches to research, with research on a mission being used to meet pressing challenges and curiosity-driven, blue-sky research to open new frontiers. It is just that any decision on where to strike that balance should rest on deliberation and evidence, rather than on which topics happen to be fashionable in global policy discourse at a given moment.
Because it understates how much of transformative science begins without any defined mission at all, i.e. as curiosity-driven research, this, too, is worth taking seriously but also debating carefully.
The country’s science system has historically been shaped by the experience, judgment, and leadership of eminent scientists.
