A few years ago I had written in these very pages of Civil Society a column titled “Funding the Indian Think Tank”. I was commenting on a controversy raging at the time on the issue of Indian think tanks getting foreign funds. That column followed a 2013 column I had written in Business Standard titled “Indian Minds, Foreign Funds”. Both columns noted the fact that India’s premier think tanks and research institutions find it easier to raise funds abroad than at home.
Be it owing to a bureaucratic and feudal governmental system or a miserly and disinterested corporate sector, research across most disciplines in the sciences, social sciences and even critical technology sectors gets poorly funded in India. If Indian authorities are worried about foreign funding they ought to help encourage greater domestic funding of research rather than merely targeting foreign funding. For, after all, India does produce many keen minds interested in pursuing research who find funding a key constraint, apart from other bureaucratic constraints.
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