It is not easy or desirable to divide history into neat phases. In the history of Indian R&D, such a division is not just desirable but crucial to one’s understanding. After four decades of stillness, Indian R&D changed dramatically in the year 1991, when India began liberalising. Thus started a series of events that altered the country’s R&D landscape forever. And it is still continuing.

Till 1991, Indian R&D institutions enjoyed a level of patronage that bordered on extreme luxury. R&D institutions then consisted entirely of national laboratories and a few high-profile universities like IISc and the IITs. Private sector R&D was negligible. Multinationals had started taking interest, but Texas Instruments and Motorola were the only ones that had made any sort of commitment in India. In the four decades since Independence, India had produced some great scientists. But scientists had generally functioned without real accountability.

As India liberalised, the government immediately switched to cutting funding for research in real terms. Over the next six years, Indian labs deteriorated rapidly in terms of facilities. By 1997, Indian science and technology had reached a crisis. Research equipment was outdated at a time when scientific instrumentation had seen extraordinary advances. Things began reversing after that, but purely in terms of funding. Now, public sector R&D is seeing a serious crisis at many levels. The question on the minds of all serious researchers in India is: are we seeing a permanent shift in the nature of Indian R&D?