Pluti - Leaping in Research
There is widespread recognition that India stands at an opportune cusp - she has a large demography of young English speakers, a maturing democratic political system, a leading digital public good infrastructure, a deep and active civilizational grounding, and a positive international image thanks in part to a dynamic diaspora.
Amongst the various things India needs to do to capture this opportunity, accelerating technological research would rank amongst the top. The reasons for this are fairly obvious - technology is rapidly evolving in most fields and innovation is necessary to create immediate business opportunities, broad-based quality of life improvements, and lasting strategic advantages.
India has been fortunate to have created institutions such as the IITs, IISc, TIFR, JIPMER, NCBS, NISER, IISER, NCCS, IARI, and many others. These institutions have contributed immensely to the creation of technologies and more importantly in building the human capital required to drive innovation across fields.
However, it is plainly clear that we need to supplement these institutions, consistently, to keep up both with the rapidly changing international scene of technological innovation and the growing demands within the country for education, technology transfer, and thought leadership.
In this essay, we make the case for a new organization, which we code-name Pluti, to significantly accelerate technological innovation in existing research institutions by offering thought leadership and funding, and a set of services and platforms to accelerate research. Pluti in Sanskrit means to skip or leap, evoking the necessary call to action.
Principles of Pluti
P1. Create capacity to do more in research
India spends about Rs 3,500 on R&D per citizen in a year, translating to a gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) ratio of 0.7%. This is significantly lower than the global average of 1.8%, and pales in comparison to Israel’s ratio of 4.5%. We need to do more, much more.
But how do we do that? One way is to scale horizontally and create new institutions. Many new IITs and IISERs are examples of this. Another approach is to fund centers of excellence and research efforts within existing institutions, i.e., to scale vertically. Both of these are essential, and the public sector is leading with the funding for these.
But we make the case for a third option - to create a new organization external to current institutions with a mandate to closely cooperate with and strengthen existing institutions.
There are various reasons to consider this option. Existing institutions have developed a labyrinthine bureaucratic process that is incentivized to be risk averse. Procurement and hiring norms, even under private funding, are outdated and result in significantly disadvantaging our researchers. While funding for critical sectors like nuclear, space, and defence should be regulated stringently, funding for most other areas can be managed through an external organization with simpler processes, while being fully auditable. To the extent possible, our research institutions should be relieved of their role in managing funds given their public sector masters.
Another reason relates to collaboration. Expertise is often spread across institutions and there are no proven mechanisms to create and champion cross-institutional teams. It is but natural that today such teams, referred to as ‘consortia’, are riled with organizational and leadership challenges. Thus, there is a case for an external agency to provide the leadership to enable cross-institutional collaboration. This is foundational in shifting from a ‘project’ mindset to working together to solve grand challenges at the national scale.
Thus, we clearly need to spend more on R&D as a country. To absorb this additional funding, we need an organization with demonstrable expertise in simplifying funding logistics and enabling cross-institutional collaboration.
P2. Become the “Yellow Pages” for research
Functionally, a key challenge of managing research is discovery - discovery of the problems, discovery of talent, and discovery of funding. In spite of its paramount importance, there are no strong institutional structures to support discovery, today.
We need a platform where the top technical challenges that the country faces are listed, debated, and defined. Such discovery should lend us mission statements to rally around. How do we provide food and water security to all citizens? Can we bridge language barriers with open-source AI? Can we secure our cyber-physical systems for a post-quantum world? Can we bring cutting-edge cancer treatments to India at affordable costs? Can we safely transition to nuclear energy in two decades? Can we devise holistic tools for humans to manage their mental well-being?
These challenges will be solved by talented researchers. We need to discover them, in significant numbers. First, talent should be discovered from existing institutions. But we need open and auditable processes especially given the large variance across institutions and disciplines. Also, talent needs to be attracted from outside India or from the industry. There is significant interest in ‘coming back and giving back’ - a trend that will likely strengthen with time. We need an organization that inspires those who are undecided about coming back to India/research to believe that they will receive a modern platform designed for them to succeed, in cooperation with existing institutions which have the brand recall.
Researchers seek money, an activity for which they spend a significant amount of time. Funding sources from the government are many, but often suffer from perceptions of having complex and opaque processes. Private corporations have ‘university relations’ divisions but often repeatedly animate university counterparts to little effect. And while Indian philanthropy is coming of age, we need a platform to highlight deep tech innovations across institutions and enable philanthropic money to be invested with confidence and accountability.
Creating a trusted brand that is recognized as a go-to destination for identifying the key research problems to invest on, attracting the top-notch research talent, and engaging committed philanthropes will itself be a major accelerant to research in India.
P3. Build excellence in metascience
There is no standard playbook for R&D. In the past, some highly successful efforts were championed by defense and space missions. There are also examples of innovation in privately funded labs such as Bell Labs. There are successful institutes such as the Stanford Research Institute that are built alongside universities to accelerate technology transfer. Then there are recent examples of funding from startup billionaires such as the Fast Grants to meet specific events such as the pandemic or longer-term efforts such as the Arc Institute. And more recently there is call for open and decentralized research, breaking the walled gardens of journalst.
Apart from the administration of funding, there are several other open questions. Should there be greater focus on blue-sky research or translational work? How important is it to deploy real-world solutions, and at which stage? How do we measure value created for citizens? How should the various levels of government be engaged with? When to open-source, when to patent, or when to license?
These questions can only be answered by building a learning organization, an organization which tries out different ideas and embodies the essential knowledge from these trials in its very functioning, experimenting with the science of doing science, i.e., doing metascience.
There is risk for this point to be under-valued. Science by definition is experimental and data driven. The process of doing science also needs to be modelled, evaluated, and optimized scientifically. Our current institutions may not have the expertise or even the bandwidth to this. Hence, we deserve an organization whose mission statement it is to identify and embody the best practices of metascience specific to the opportunities and challenges in India.
P4. Have an open governance with decentralized power
We live in polarized times. Contentious issues surround us, and those responding to them are castigated one way or the other. The personal, the political, and the professional are bundled into an irredeemable whole.
In response to this, we need an organization that is by design non-controversial and instead focused on delivering value to society. It should take no stance in political matters but must fiercely support any of its members taking any political stance as they personally see fit. Affiliation to the organization must only require alignment on matters concerning research, the primary and only focus of the organization.
To maintain this, the organization must not be affiliated to any specific institution. It should have an open architecture allowing any set of research institutions, funders, and researchers to apply to be part of it. It must place all its activities under public scrutiny, including the conduct of competitive grants, financial audits, and the choice of office bearers.
Such an architecture would also benefit from a digital-first organization that takes up physical infrastructure only if essential.
Outside the context of research, the creation of such an organization is also an opportunity to showcase cooperation at a national scale. We need an organization that demonstrates how asset-light co-determined societies with aligned principles can be built amongst people across a range of distances.
P5. Demonstrate care needed for research
Innovation is tough and risky. And so, it is important to nurture the human and organizational infrastructure that enables it, with care.
One form of care is to offer the long rope to researchers both timewise and the latitude to fail. Lack of acceptance of failure creates room for lethargy at best or creation of ineffective metrics at worse. The top 1,000 researchers in India, identified with an open, fair, and auditable process, should be compensated at par with top-notch private sector packages. The value proposition is a no-brainer: top researchers are fulcrums of change in our society critically impacting several people and outcomes.
A second form of care is to recognize that researchers like any other profession require continued mentorship and human development. A researcher begins with expertise in a technical field but is expected to grow to be an inspiring teacher, to be a multi-tasking manager, a visionary, and even an entrepreneur in a relatively short period of time. This requires guidance. India is lucky to have many potential mentors of Indian origin at the helm of various research fields worldwide. There have been recent attempts to create this synergy, but we need to do more. We need a trusted and identifiable platform to productively interface researchers of Indian origin from across the globe.
A third and perhaps the most important form of care is leadership. Organizations win because of leadership. And India has produced great organizations and greater leaders. We need the care of honed leadership to direct research innovation. Innovation is far too important to be left to only giving awards and scholarships at yearly events. It needs to be driven with utmost care and intent by leaders from various spheres, from the private sector, from our armed forces, from the non-profit sector, along with intentioned researchers.
In summary, we make the case for Pluti an organization that unbundles our complex and overburdened research institutions. It would specialize to create services and platforms to fund and manage research. It should be an efficient, new-age organization that is maximally trusted and should bring the best minds together to address the essential challenge of significantly upping India’s game in scientific research.
PS: Image credit to Stable Diffusion which generated this image as a cross between a scientist and Hanuman leaping across the ocean.
Excellent! This article needs to be shared widely with a diverse audience, may be ask Nandan, Sriram, etc. to share :)