Indian scientists batting for hike in R&D expenditure.

Updated on: Thursday, August 09, 2012

The US and China may be making huge investments in scientific research, but India has scored more than these two countries in terms of number of articles published in peer review journals, according to scientists who are batting for hike in R&D expenditure.

"Considering R&D expenditure, India spent USD 24 billion during 2007 compared to USD 102 billion by China and USD 377 billion by the USA," a team of government scientists said.

"However, India published 758 articles per billion US dollars in comparison to 557 by China and the USA," Rajesh Luthra, S A Hasan and Sushila Khilnani, of the Human Resource Development Group of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) wrote in Current Science.

They argued that data pertaining to the science and engineering (S&E) articles published and gross expenditure on R&D indicate that the number of articles published is directly proportional to R&D expenditure.

Since the number of articles published is proportional to the number of researchers, directed efforts are required to augment the number of S&E researchers in India, they said.

"Hence, an increase in R&D expenditure and quality S&T manpower is needed to help India emerge as a leading country in the knowledge-base economy of the world," they said.

The average annual growth rate with respect to publishing S&E articles was 16.2 per cent for China compared to 5.6 per cent for India during the period 19952009, the scientists said.

India marginally improved its ranking from 12th (1995) to 11th (2009), whereas China took a great leap from 14th position (1995) to second (2009).

Though the annual average growth rate for USA was just 0.6 per cent during the period, it was far ahead of China in terms of number of articles published, they said.

China's share in engineering research articles (1273) was just 3 per cent in 1995 in comparison to 30 per cent (12,645) for the US. In 2009, China's share increased to 15.3 per cent (12,234), whereas the share of the US (14,609) decreased to 17.6 per cent.

In science research articles, China's share increased from 1.5 per cent (1995) to 8.7 per cent (2009), whereas the share of the US decreased from 34.6 per cent to 27.5 per cent.

India's share in science articles increased slightly from 1.6 per cent in 1995 to 2.3 per cent in 2009, whereas for engineering articles it increased from 2.8 per cent in 1995 to 4.1 per cent in 2009, the scientists said.

In 2008, the number of engineering PhDs produced in USA, China and India was 8,110, 15,276 and 1,427 respectively, whereas in science it was 25,249, 13,163 and 5,301 respectively.

Indian scientists batting for hike in R&D expenditure.

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