A recent report by NITI Aayog, about ‘Ease of Doing R&D in India’ revealed some uncomfortable truths about India’s R&D ecosystem. This is despite ANRF’s mandate to support a wider base of universities and research bodies than the traditional funding model has managed. Together with a companion survey with inputs from more than 400 institutional leaders and 850 scientists, it reported that close to 80% of funding under the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) — the flagship research funding body — is concentrated in the IITs.
There are also concerns that multiple Central agencies are possibly funding similar research areas, resulting in overlap and what the report calls “inefficient” use of public money.
The technical term for what is missing is ‘PIDs and metadata infrastructure’. In plain language, it means every research grant in India will need a permanent, unique, machine-readable identifier called a persistent digital identifier (PID). This is like how a PAN number identifies a taxpayer or an IMEI number identifies a mobile phone. Right now, a lot of this information exists within Indian funding agencies — but it is scattered across dozens of separate agency databases, in inconsistent formats, and often as free text rather than structured data. A researcher’s name might appear one way in a Department of Science and Technology (DST) record and slightly differently in a Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) database — and this difference can be enough for an automated system to not tell that they are the same person. Multiply such inconsistencies across thousands of grants a year and you can see that the result is an information that does not provide a reliable picture of how research funding is being used. This is not a new problem and India does not have to solve it from scratch. A global, non-profit infrastructure setup called the Grant Linking System already exists to do exactly this. It was built by the open digital infrastructure organisation Crossref. Its registry is called ‘Research Organisation Registry’ (ROR), built by a different organisation. The second option is to plug into the existing global non-profit infrastructure, requiring India’s funding agencies to become members of — and consistently deposit data with — the Crossref ecosystem that many research funders already use worldwide. This can be implemented faster since the technical standards and governance already exist, and are maintained by an international community rather than by a single Indian agency operating alone. It would also make India’s publicly funded research immediately visible and comparable within the same global dataset used to study research funding everywhere. This gives national governments political ownership and the ability to require all domestic agencies to comply — while also ensuring that the resulting data speaks the same language as the rest of the world’s research infrastructure.
An institution might be listed as “IISc, Bangalore” in one dataset and “Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru” in another, leading to a similar problem.
