India spends only around 4.9 per cent of its GDP on education, and of this around one-third is spent on higher education. Despite this, the amount of money spent on research in education is very less. As per global studies on research investment, India spends 0.85 per cent of GDP on research as against the US, which spends 2.74 per cent, China (2.10 per cent), Japan (3.58 per cent), Germany (2.84 per cent) and South Korea (4.29 per cent), Minister of State, HRD, Mahendra Nath Pandey said in a written reply to a question in Parliament.

The government itself agrees that the requirement of funds in the higher educational institutions has always been higher than the funds that are made available through the budgetary route. “While making all efforts to increase budgetary allocations for higher education, the government has encouraged higher educational institutions to improve their internal resource generation through consultancies/research in order to convert themselves into financially robust institutions,” the minister said.

This year, the Budget allocated for higher education is around Rs 33,000 crore, of which a major increase of Rs 3,000 crore from last year has been given to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). The amount of funds allocated for research, this year, is around Rs 315 crore only.

Across the world, a common approach for funding research in universities is to provide research grants through various funding agencies, which has not been happening in India actively. In India, the budgetary allocation to overheads is very small, which barely covers the cost of space, electricity, A/C, security, etc. It does not cover the critical and significant cost of R&D establishment that a university has to provide to support projects, or the cost of faculty time spent on research, or other indirect costs.

However, recently, the Ministry of Human Resource Development has started to focus on research. Two schemes — Impacting Research Innovation and Technology (IMPRINT), and Uchhatar Avishkar Yojana (UAY) — have been launched in the last two years to generate funds for research purposes. IMPRINT focuses on research in higher educational institutions, with an allocation Rs 487 crore for a period of three years beginning 2016-17. UAY promotes industry-sponsored, outcome-oriented research projects with an outlay of Rs 475 crore for a period of two years beginning 2016-17.