Subtracting from science funding
NavIC’s hurdles project govt’s reluctance to fund innovation’, Hindustan Times, February 7, 2025:
India … chose a more cautious path. For decades, we’ve been telling ourselves that we’ll invest in science “when we’re economically better off.” It’s both prudent and a paradox. How do you become economically better off without investing in the very thing that drives development in the first place? It’s like waiting to plant a tree until you’re sure it will bear fruit tomorrow. That hesitation shows in the numbers: India spends just 0.6% of its GDP on scientific research. For comparison, China spends over 2.5%, and the United States spends 3%.
Charles Assisi has an interesting analysis of the partial failure of the NVS-02 mission. (‘Partial’ because ISRO is currently looking to repurpose the satellite. The terms of this exercise aren’t yet clear.) “When you’re constantly short of funds, every setback feels heavier” — spot on. In fact, my cynical self inclined is inclined ask him if he really believes the present government is interested in stoking development when it has been making the right noises, but only noises, about increasing the private sector’s contribution to R&D expenses while allowing the growth of the public sector’s contribution to grow more slowly than the GDP.
This said, I’m more curious about the final sentence of the same paragraph:
Worse still, when you dig into the details, much of India’s scientific budget is buried within defense spending, which means it doesn’t always trickle down to civilian applications or long-term innovation.
Unless growth in defence spending has somehow exactly matched decline in spending on R&D, I’m curious how defence alone can be said to have subtracted from science. Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn’t, but I wouldn’t have used the argument because it presumes whatever that money was spent on didn’t have civilian interests at heart. It’s a strawman. It isn’t a crime without a victim either because of the notion that the scientific enterprise is incapable of delivering anything less than “civilian applications or long-term innovation”, even with sufficient funding. The arc of the scientific enterprise doesn’t bend towards the public interest by itself.
It’s also possible that what the R&D budget lost, the nuclear establishment gained — and I could get behind that. But beyond the subtraction itself, the question of which ministry or sector benefited is meaningless. The finance ministry makes its allocations from a large pool, and it only makes sense to talk about what science lost in terms of what science lost, rather than because X gained rather than Y.