Scientific research: India
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Researchers per capita
The Times of India Jun 28 2015
Chethan Kumar
India lags behind even Kenya in research: Study
Has just four researchers for every 10,000 working people, says Scopus
A recent study has shown that India has fewer researchers among working people than countries such as Kenya and Chile. The country has only four researchers for 10,000 working people, while Kenya and Chile have six and seven respectively , according to Scopus data, which is the world's largest abstract and citation database on scientific literature. entific literature.
Analysing this data, Nature magazine says Brazil has 14 researchers per 10,000 working people, and China has 18. UK and the US top the table with 79 researchers each followed by Russia with 58.
Nature Magazine, Nature Magazine, in its May 2015 report, also said: “India's publications generate fewer citations on an average than other science-focused nations, including Brazil and China.“ It further states that relative to its size, India has very few scientists and many Indian-born researchers go abroad, while very few foreign scientists settle in India. The data also reveals that there are only 2 lakh fulltime researchers in India with 14% of them being women.
Principal scientific adviser to the Centre, R Chidambaram, told TOI: “The way forward is to attract and re tain talented young people. The prob lem is occurring at two places, one at the class 12 level, where a lot of talented people interested in pure sciences are getting into engineering and the other is at the B-Tech level, where a lot of good engineering researchers jump to management courses.“
Dr Gajanana Birur, who had worked with Isro for two years before joining Nasa, says, “At one point the problem was of infrastructure.
Now, as India builds up its infrastructure, there is an overall lack of environment for good research al though places like Is ro, IISc and IITs are do ing well. This pushes people to go out.“ people to go out.” The study further notes that India s registers far fewer applications per capita than any other top-filing nation.
“It is multinationals in India that have boosted the filing rate,“ Nature said, s indicating that research institutes are still lagging behind. Quoting data from the World Intellectual Property Organization, Nature says: “Domestic and foreign patents filed per 1 million population in India is at 17 compared to 4,451 in South Korea, 3,716 in Japan with even China filing 541 patents.“
