IN A major intervention aimed at strengthening the scientific base in the country, the government on Tuesday approved a programme to build partnerships between top research institutions and universities to carry out joint research projects. These research projects would be fully funded by Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), a new research funding agency set up last year to address structural deficiencies in India’s scientific research and development sector. The ANRF held its first governing body meeting on Tuesday, with PM Narendra Modi attending it in his capacity as its president.he ANRF was created to serve two main purposes — substantially increase the financial resources available for scientific research, from public as well as private sources, and expand the research base in the country, especially in colleges and universities where research capability is extremely limited or non-existent.
The ANRF concept note had lamented that less than 1% of India’s nearly 40,000 institutions of higher education were engaged in research activities. Scientific research in India is concentrated mainly in specialised institutions like Indian Institute of Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research or the IITs, in sharp contrast to many other countries where universities are nerve centres of research. As the first step towards addressing this anomaly, the ANRF seeks to create linkages between topmost research institutions and universities, and fund them to carry out joint research projects. This is expected to build research capacities in the university system, and expose university teachers and professors, and students to advanced research.
This initiative is envisaged to work in a hub-and-spoke model, with one top research institution hand-holding three to seven universities in carrying out scientific research in any one of the high-priority areas considered crucial to the country’s growth and development. “Over the next five years, we hope to see at least 20 such hub-and-spoke models working in different areas. This will mean about 100-150 universities would be actively working in priority research areas,” an official said.
The ANRF has been allocated a budget of Rs 14,000 crore over a five-year period. That translates to Rs 2,800 crore every year, a substantial improvement over the roughly Rs 800 crore annual budget that the previous science funding agency, Science and Engineering Research Board, used to have. In addition, the ANRF is expected to mobilise Rs 36,000 crore in the next five years through private sources, taking its total resources to Rs 50,000 crore.
Officials said now that the governing board headed by the PM has approved the proposal, top research institutions would be invited to identify universities they would like to collaborate with and submit applications for joint projects. “The call for proposals is expected to be floated within a month,” an official said. The ANRF governing body also decided to ease restrictions on the use of funds meant for scientific research. “Currently, the research funds can be utilised only under certain heads, and switching a part of the money from one head to the other is a tedious process. We have decided to introduce some flexibility on these issues. The exact details are still to be worked out, but one idea is to have just two broad heads for expenditure of research funds — recurring and non-recurring. Researchers can spend the money according to their project requirements, without having to do a lot of paperwork,” the official said.
“The main idea is to allow scientists to spend most of their time on their research and not bind them in processes. We will facilitate whatever needs to be done to ensure ease of doing research. This would include giving scientists and institutions a greater degree of flexibility in hiring project staff,” the official said. ANRF board also decided to launch a mission-mode programme to initiate multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary research to develop indigenous technologies related to e-vehicles.