Revision as of 21:24, 23 April 2017

Patents, Researchers, Publications in India and other major countries: 2013; Graphic courtesy: The Times of India Jan 10 2016

Research output improves 2008-12

49% rise in PhDs in 3 years

Jump In India’s Contribution To World’s Research Publications: Tharoor

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

The Times of India 2013/08/16

New Delhi: Poor research output of students is considered one of the biggest drawbacks of Indian higher education. But government claims there has been a 49.27% growth in the number of research degrees (Ph.Ds) awarded by the Indian universities between 2008-09 and 2011-12.

Ministry of human resource development said: in 2008-09, 10,781 Ph.Ds were awarded that increased to 16,093 in 2011-12.

There has also been a massive jump in India’s contribution to world’s research publications. Citing a report by the UNESCO Institute of Statistics, the ministry said it increased from 26,000 in 2002 to 44,000 in 2007.

Despite the rapid strides in research, India is still way behind other nations. In the same period, the number of Ph.Ds in China increased from 14,706 to 48,112. Increase in Ph.Ds in the US was, however, marginal —from 40,024 to 41,464.

As for the contribution to the world publications UNESCO data shows that between 2002 and 2007, Brazil’s contribution increased from 16,000 to 29,000, Russia (31,000 to 32,000), China (62,000 to 1.94 lakh), the UK (93,000 to 1.25 lakh), the US (3.15 lakh to 3.58 lakh) and Japan (92,000 to 98,000).

Tharoor said government has taken various steps for promotion and growth of postgraduate level studies and research. New institutions for science education and research have been set up. Universities are getting centres of excellence, new and attractive fellowships are on offer as well as there is emphasis on strengthening the infrastructure of Research & Development in universities. Tharoor said the HRD ministry had also set up a task force for rejuvenation of basic scientific research under M M Sharma. The task force has been converted into an empowered committee to implement its own recommendations.

In social sciences various research councils — Indian Council of Historical Research, Indian Council of Social Science Research and Indian Council of Philosophical Research — have been asked to fund more research initiatives.

2009-13: 13.9% growth

The Times of India, May 02 2016

India's research work growing

Sushmi Dey

India's research performance in science and technology has improved significantly over the past few years. Scholarly output in the country grew by 13.9% during 2009-13, against a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.1% for the world. Moreover, India has also demonstrated a growing impact through its research worldwide. For instance, India's share of world patent citations and top cited papers increased between 0.8 and 1.2 percentage points from 2009 to 2013.

In 2013, India held over 3% of the world's top 10% cited papers. This indicates India is not just growing scientifically, but growing aggressively at the very top end of scientific excellence. India's share of world patent citation, or patent cited for later papers or patents, also improved from 2.2% in 2009 to almost 3% in 2013. Experts said, in absolute terms, the growth was significant with India registering 109 patent citations in 2013.

The findings are part of a new bibliometric study published in international scientific journal `Elsevier'.

The international comparative study , conducted by Department of Science and Technology , analysed India's research performance during 2009-13 using Scopus database, the largest of peer-reviewed literature.

According to the study , India's scholarly output increased from 62,955 papers in 2009 to 106,065 papers in 2013.

2013-16, Number of MNCs and R & D centres

Sujit John & Shilpa Phadnis, For MNCs, India remains R&D hub, March 2, 2017: The Times of India

Number of MNCs and research and development centres in India, 2013-16; Sujit John & Shilpa Phadnis, For MNCs, India remains R&D hub, March 2, 2017: The Times of India

The number of R&D centres being established by MNCs in India continues to rise -the vast majority are from the US -and their headcount growth is particularly strong.

In 2016, as many as 943 MNCs were in India with 1,208 R&D centres -some MNCs have multiple units in the country.This is up from 928 MNCs with 1,165 R&D centres in the year before, according to consulting firm Zinnov's latest annual report on global in-house centres (GICs). A GIC is an R&D, business process management (BPM) or IT centre that a company establishes for its internal needs outside the home country .

India, along side China, has the highest number of GICs in the world, mainly on account of the large numbers of engineering talent it produces, and their lower costs in comparison to mature markets. Uber, LeEco and Diageo were among the MNCs that established GICs in India for the first time last year.

The number of people in the R&D centres rose12% to 3,63,000 in 2016, from 3,23,000 in the year before. Total GIC revenue is estimated at over $23 billion in 2016.Between 2010 and 2016, revenue grew at an estimated compounded annual growth rate of 12%.Bengaluru accounted for 35% of the GICs, with NCR a distant second with 15%. The R&D centres are seen to be maturing rapidly . While they started off in the 1990s and early 2000s providing low-end activities, today , many of them are driving global initiatives and designing and developing products for different markets. Preeti Anand, director and head of engineering excellence practice at Zinnov , said GICs in India now deliver more value with the objective of contributing directly to the headquarter's business. “From being an operations and delivery centre, GICs are becoming innovation hubs,“ she said.

Some 100 centres of excellence -entities that provide leadership, best practices, and research -have emerged in the GICs. Anand said much of the work in these centres of excellence, as also in many of the other GICs, is focused on digital initiatives, including advanced analytics, cognitive computing & machine learning, automation & robotics, and virtual reality. These technologies are used to create mobile and web apps, digital marketing and social engagement platforms, commerce platforms, and to get operational insights in real time. “Indian GICs have been increasingly managing complex projects and have developed end-to-end delivery capabilities,“ Anand said.

On the BPM (what previously used to be called BPO) side, while the number of new centres continues to rise, people additions have sharply slowed because of increasing adoption of what Zinnov calls robotic process automation. Automation is going well beyond the rule-based automation of the past to cognitive platforms, systems that can understand unstructured data, recognise voice, tone, gestures. Anand pointed out instances where banks could use these systems to increase the number of account closures from 12-13 per hour to 200 an hour, and where company audits that took 6-10 hours were brought down to a minute.

2015: No. 1 choice for global tech R&D

The Times of India, Dec 09 2015

Sujit John

India No. 1 choice for global tech R&D 

69% Of All New Offshore Tech Centres Established In 2015 Came Up In Country

India remains he No. 1 location for MNCs o establish product engineering and R&D centres outside their home countries, and he growth of these centres n India is outpacing the average global growth. India accounted for $12.3 billion, or 40%, of the total of $31billion of globalized engineering and R&D in 2015, according to a study by consul ing firm Zinnov. Compared o 2014, the revenues of the captives in India grew by 8.3%, as against the growth of 7.6% for all captives. China follows India with revenues of $9.7 billion.

Zinnov, which has been ocused on this space since it was founded over a decade ago, finds that 69% of all new offshore technology centres his year were set up in India.The past two years have seen a spate of new centres being set up and the older ones expanding, including those of Exxon Mobil, Lowe's, Visa, Victoria's Secret, JC Penny , CME Group, Wells Fargo, and British Telecom.

Software & internet accounts for 35% of the work be ng done in the captives, telecom & networking follows with 14% and semiconduc ors 12%. Consumer electronics, automotive, computer peripherals, medical devices, industrial, and aerospace & defence are other areas of work.

Zinnov finds another in eresting trend: engineering and R&D outsourcing to third parties is beginning to outpace growth of captives in India.

ndia is the second biggest outsourcing destination, after Western Europe, where companies like Altran, Alten, Ak ka Technologies, Assystem and Harman Connected Services are strong.

India accounted for $7.8 billion, or 21.6%, of the total outsourced engineering and R&D services of $36 billion in 2015. Compared to 2014, it grew at 12.7%, as against the global growth of 8.7%.

“Five years ago, the growth was coming primarily from captives. Now, the captives have matured, and it is the third-party service providers who are growing faster,“ Sidhant Rastogi, partner in Zinnov , said. While captives do more of the work they consider proprietary and those that involve new technologies, they outsource a lot of the rest of the work.

Independent software vendors and telecom outsourcers dominated the outsourced pie. But the fastest growth came in the automotive, software and medical segments, the first thanks to the trend towards connected cars and change in labour laws in Germany.

TCS, Wipro and HCL Technologies have traditionally been the leading players in this space. “However, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, L&T and Aricent are giving good competition to the top 3. Even European players like Altran and Alten are setting up centres in India,“ Rastogi said.

Total R&D spending by the top 500 R&D spenders in the world grew by 2% to reach $614 billion this year.That means, globalized and outsourced R&D together ($67 billion) accounts for 11% of total R&D.

Rastogi said the outsourced R&D space was seeing a huge acquisition trend. Aricent acquired SmartPlay to get embedded and semiconductor competency, Altran acquired Nspyr and Sicontech to grow in the US market, Quest Global acquired Nest to diversify in embedded software services, Capgemini and Harman entered the product engineering services market through acquisition of mid-sized engineering firms.

“No one has grown more than 13% without acquisitions. So Indian players will have to acquire to grow faster,“ Rastogi said.

The status of S&T in India:2016

The Times of India Jan 10 2016

R&D investment as % of GDP: 2011; Graphic courtesy: The Times of India Jan 10 2016

Subodh Varma

59% of secondary schools in India don't have an integrated science laboratory although science is compulsory till class 10. So, a vast majority of students `study' science without ever seeing any experiment, let alone doing it. At the +2 level where students opt for science, just 32% schools have separate rooms for laboratories and a quarter of them are `partially equipped'. Perhaps they are being taught via the web? No chance, because just 37% of schools have a computer with net connection.

Not an easy prospect since the problem begins in schools and colleges. Students who do go through the grind and finally get into science and technology related jobs see their dreams die in India's vast but faltering science establishment.

One of India's top genetic scientists and former director general of CSIR, Samir Brahmachari told TOI that the crisis in science is because it is not attracting the best minds. “Science education has moved from being a curiosity-driven exploration to a mark-scoring exercise to get admission in elite institutions and bag a fat corporate salary . In the process, academia has also lost high quality teachers who shape young minds,“ he said.

“Building a knowledge-based society demands significant increase in investment for S&T at several levels including education as well as research leading to outcomes in pure and applied areas,“ eminent space scientist K Kasturirangan, former head of ISRO and ex-member Planning Commission, told TOI. India has just 4 scientific researchers for every 10,000 people in the workforce, much lower than not just advanced countries like the US or UK but even China and Brazil (see box).

“The goal of spending at least 2% of GDP on scientific research -outlined in the govt's science policy of 2003 -has not been achieved. Even industry funding, which was declared as the magic wand for finances, hasn't delivered,“ rues Dinesh Abrol, visiting professor at JNU.

As per latest available figures, India is spending less than 1% on research and development com pared to 1.9% in China and 2.75% in US.The combined result of defective grounding at the schoolcollege level and limited resources for re search is evident in the met rics that provide a partial measure of India's scienDtific output and its significance. Scientific papers published by Indians numbered about 90,000 in 2013 compared to 4,50,000 by Americans and 3,25,000 by Chinese. Citations too were below the world average. Indians filed just 17 patents per million population compared to 541 in China and 4,451 in South Korea.

“I am not worried about the quantity as much as the quality of science coming from India. It is also not showing any improvement. India still contributes less than 1% of the world's top 1% of research,“ Rao said.

Brahmachari sees the glass half full. Given the low input, and that the best minds have left India for greener pastures, he feels Indian science has done “outstandingly well“.

Ramamurthy highlights another key problem in the way science is being practised in the country -the project mode. “In today's environment of research in project mode with well-defined objectives, milestones and deliverables, curiosity-driven research is a casualty,“ he said.

Research objectives too are increasingly disconnected from society, asserts Abrol. Giving the example of agriculture, he says that an obsession with increasing yield while ignoring the consequences of intensive agriculture in the five major grain producing states has led to a sustainability crisis -ground water depletion, waterlogging, chemical over-kill. “Yet our research goals continue to be better yielding varieties rather than sustainable productivity ,“ he said.