In 2017, Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan was leading a cell biology laboratory at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. In the course of her research work, Ananthanarayanan realised that the technology she needed for a particular experiment wasn’t available in India. “Someone from my team needed to travel to Germany to carry out some Correlative Light Electron Microscopy, a cutting edge technique that I felt was required for some work we were doing at that point in time,” she said.
On paper, Ananthanarayanan had the money to do this work – she had secured a grant for the research project from the Government of India’s Department of Biotechnology, or DBT. But the funding hadn’t arrived yet. She waited for several months, to no avail. Eventually, she had to abandon the plan. “I couldn’t do the CLEM experiment because I did not get the funding in time,” she said.
A few years later, the University of New South Wales in Australia approached Ananthanarayanan with an offer to lead a lab there. She accepted, and started her new job in November 2020.
Once she was there, the pace of her work changed dramatically, and she was able to pick up her abandoned experiment – the university itself had facilities to carry out CLEM work. “I joined in November 2020, and by March 2021, I had hired a postdoctoral researcher and we carried out the technique here,” she noted. “And by April 2021, the data from this particular experiment was already in our manuscript, in pre-print.”
This episode was a stark reminder to Ananthanarayanan of how deeply the problem of funding delays affects Indian scientists, and Indian science itself.
While Ananthanarayanan is among the lucky scientists who have managed to secure a position abroad, in institutions where processes run smoother, most Indian researchers remain in the country, grappling with these delays, trying to excel in their work even as they are starved for resources.
Ananthanarayanan was also in the relatively secure position of a lab head, or principal investigator, referred to as a PI – salaries for scientists at her level typically arrive on time. Lower down the ladder are PhD students, who aren’t similarly protected. These students rely on fellowships to support them through gruelling years of their life. Among the biggest providers of these fellowships are government agencies like the University Grants Commission, or UGC, and the Council Of Scientific and Industrial Research, or CSIR. CSIR alone has over 8,000 junior and senior research fellows across the country.
They are also the most notorious when it comes to delays in fellowship disbursal. “When I hear of big science and technology mission programmes being launched in India, I wonder – who is going to do all this?” said Sarah Iqbal, an independent science engagement consultant. “PIs are not running experiments, they are just coming up with ideas. It is really the postdocs and the PhD students who are the chief scientific workforce. If we are not taking care of them, what are we really trying to achieve here?”
Delays exacerbate the enormous challenges that researchers already face in securing funds for their work. According to a 2020 report from the Department of Science and Technology (DST), the majority of research in India relies on public funding. Yet, India spends a miniscule 0.7% of its GDP on research, which, according to data from the World Bank, is lower than most other developed and developing countries in the world. Most of this is allocated for defence, atomic energy and space-related research – according to the 2020 report, these sectors spent more than 61% of the Central government’s research and development funds that year.
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