Somewhere in a university laboratory, a young doctoral scholar is bent over a spectrometer at midnight, measuring isotopic ratios in geological samples that might one day help explain the tectonic formation of the Indian subcontinent—earning a Junior Research Fellowship of ₹37,000 a month — a figure that rose from ₹31,000 in January 2023 when the Department of Science and Technology revised stipends upward by 19% for JRF holders and 20% for Senior Research Fellows, who now receive ₹42,000 a month from their third year onward. The revision, welcomed by scholars, nevertheless came with a reminder of what remains unaddressed: non-NET fellows — those without national eligibility certification — continue to receive a non-NET fellowship of ₹8,000 per month, a figure unchanged for over a decade. The scholar at the spectrometer, if among the more fortunate cohort, is funded. He is also, statistically speaking, unlikely to publish before submitting his thesis. And under current rules, he no longer has to.
That last detail matters. In November 2022, the University Grants Commission officially notified new PhD regulations that scrapped the mandatory requirement for doctoral scholars to publish research papers in peer-reviewed journals before submitting their thesis. Earlier, the rules required PhD scholars to publish at least one paper in a refereed journal and present at two conferences before their thesis could be adjudicated. The UGC’s rationale was clear: mandatory publication had become counterproductive. A study commissioned by the UGC found that 75% of papers submitted to journals by doctoral candidates followed UGC guidelines but did not meet the quality bar of Scopus-indexed publications. The pressure was producing paper, not knowledge. UGC Chairman M. Jagadesh Kumar stated that “some people erroneously think that mandatory publication of a research paper before the submission of a PhD thesis decides its quality” and that “high-quality PhD thesis work leads to quality publications.” The regulation was, on paper, a reasonable reform. In practice, it opens a question that the country has not yet answered honestly: if publication is no longer a floor, what is?
A reasonable citizen observing this scene — the funded scholar, the lifted mandate, the government writing a cheque for ₹725 crore extra in fellowship disbursements — might ask whether India is simply paying for the appearance of a research culture. The question is neither cynical nor rhetorical. It is the central tension in Indian science policy, and it deserves a straight answer.
India’s public investment in research remains stubbornly low. The country’s Gross Expenditure on Research and Development has remained at 0.6–0.7% of GDP, below the global average and well below levels sustained by China, South Korea, and the United States. To place that in perspective, South Korea devotes 5.2% of its GDP to R&D, the United States 3.6%, and China 2.6%. These are not abstract comparisons. They represent decisions: how many laboratories get funded, how many instruments get purchased, how many ideas receive a fair chance before being abandoned for want of support. India’s 2% GERD target has been reiterated in every major science policy document since 2013. It has not been met.
The structural problem beneath this headline is perhaps more troubling still. India’s R&D ecosystem is overwhelmingly driven by the government sector — central agencies, state governments, and higher education institutions together account for roughly 60% of GERD, while the private sector contributes only around 36%. In the United States, this ratio is essentially inverted; private industry drives the bulk of R&D spending. The dependence on public money means that every policy choice about research in India is, in a very direct sense, a choice about what the state believes knowledge is worth. And so far, the answer has been: not quite enough.
Yet to say Indian academic research is a waste of public money would be to misread a story that is visibly changing. On sheer volume, the output numbers are genuinely striking. India now ranks third globally in research output, behind only China and the United States — a position achieved by a country that, as recently as 2020, had just 262 researchers per million population, compared with South Korea’s 8,714 and Israel’s 8,342. Between 2017 and 2022, India’s research output grew by over 54%, representing one of the fastest expansions in the world. The Nature Index, which measures high-quality scientific publications in a curated set of journals, recorded India at ninth globally in 2023, with a 14.5% increase in its adjusted share — outpacing the growth rates of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany in the same period. On the Global Innovation Index, India rose from 81st place in 2015 to 38th in 2025, reflecting improvements not merely in publications but in patents, technology intensity, and knowledge diffusion across the economy.
These are real numbers, rooted in real work. Dismissing them would be as dishonest as uncritically celebrating them.
The uncomfortable truth is that India publishes considerably more than it influences. The country ranks third in output but hovers around 19th in citation impact, as measured by the H-index — a metric that captures not how much a country produces but how much the world reads and builds upon what it produces. That gap is not a footnote. It is the distance between producing knowledge and shaping how the world thinks. A large fraction of Indian publications, particularly those appearing in journals below the Scopus threshold, are read primarily by the researchers who wrote them and by the committees that evaluated them for promotion.
Why does this gap persist? Part of the answer, paradoxically, lies in the institutional logic the UGC’s 2022 reform was meant to disrupt. For decades, the publish-or-perish system incentivised volume over substance. Doctoral candidates chased journal acceptance not because they had something important to say but because the system rewarded the act of saying it in print. A four-member UGC committee, chaired by former Indian Institute of Science Director P. Balram, recommended that publications in “predatory” journals — those which charge fees without credible peer review — should not be counted toward academic credentials at all. That recommendation has been partially absorbed into policy, but the ecosystem that made such journals profitable has not disappeared. There are thousands of them, many operating from Indian addresses.
The removal of mandatory publication requirements under UGC Regulations 2022 is best understood not as a lowering of standards but as an admission that the previous standard had been gamed so comprehensively that it served no purpose. A thesis examined rigorously by competent external reviewers may produce far more durable knowledge than four papers in journals that exist primarily to sell acceptance. Whether Indian universities will use the new flexibility to raise quality genuinely — or to reduce oversight — depends entirely on the institutional culture of each department, supervisor by supervisor, university by university.
That is the crux of the problem. India does not have a uniform research culture. It has pockets of extraordinary quality — in the IITs, the Indian Institute of Science, the CSIR network, IISER campuses — and vast stretches of mediocrity in state universities where laboratories are understaffed, equipment is outdated, and research is a formality attached to employment. The data that makes India’s aggregate performance look impressive is, to a disproportionate degree, being generated by a small elite of institutions. The rest of the system is subsidised but largely unproductive, not because its people lack ability but because the conditions for good research — funding stability, functional infrastructure, mentorship, intellectual community — are absent.
The government’s most ambitious structural response is the Anusandhan National Research Foundation, established by Parliament in 2023, with a ₹50,000 crore corpus earmarked over five years. The ANRF is designed to act as an apex body for high-level strategic direction, seeding research across universities and research institutions that have historically been bypassed by elite-institution funding. Critically, approximately 70% of that corpus is expected to be mobilised from the private sector — a mechanism for which the legislation provides aspiration but no enforcement guarantee. Private capital does not flow toward basic research because basic research does not produce returns on investment timescales that private capital recognises. Whether the industry will actually partner at the scale required, or whether the government will eventually have to make up the shortfall, remains unanswered by the ANRF Act.
Attracting Indian-origin researchers from abroad has become a parallel priority. The Ramanujan Fellowship, the J.C. Bose National Fellowship, and more recent repatriation schemes signal awareness that the country has, for decades, trained minds and then exported them. These initiatives have had genuine success in individual cases. But diaspora repatriation is not a substitute for the reforms that would make talented young Indians choose to stay in the first place: competitive salaries at the faculty level, reliable research funding, functional peer review, and the simple dignity of a working laboratory.
Is Indian academic research, then, a waste of public money? The answer is no — not wholly, not even mostly. A country that aspires to strategic autonomy in semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, space technology, and climate science cannot build that capacity without the long, slow accumulation of foundational knowledge. The scholar at the midnight spectrometer is not wasting the state’s money. She is doing what no import deal and no technology transfer agreement can substitute: learning, from first principles, how things work. That is not a luxury. It is the only foundation for a durable national capability.
But research without accountability is not virtue — it is inertia dressed in the language of inquiry. The removal of mandatory publication requirements, the chronic underfunding relative to GDP, the structural dependence on a handful of elite institutions, the private sector’s persistent non-participation — these are not small concerns to be waved away by pointing at a rising curve on the Nature Index. They are the shape of a problem that India has been accurately describing in every science policy document for thirty years, without fully solving.
The question before the country is not whether it can afford to invest in research. It is whether it can afford to continue investing in it badly, with underpaid scholars, predatory journals, unmet funding targets, and institutions that count publications rather than asking what those publications are for. The lab and the ledger are not enemies. But they have to be held in honest conversation, and that conversation, in India, is long overdue.
The writer is Ph.D Scholar, DST-INSPIRE fellow, CSIR-NET/JRF & Gold Medallist currently at Department of Earth Sciences, Pondicherry University.
