The next frontier for Indian science on the 80th Independence Day

Science benefits from mobility. The challenge is to turn brain drain into circulation and connectivity

India’s 80th Independence Day is a good time to take stock of Indian science and where it might go next. It comes at an extraordinary moment: a convergence of technologies — above all, artificial intelligence (AI) — is producing an acceleration that has few precedents. Along with Martin Rees and K VijayRaghavan, I have previously written in these pages about its potentially species-wide ramifications. Here, I will put those larger uncertainties aside and ask what India should aspire to in science over the coming decade.

India has largely solved the first problem of scientific power. Its next challenge is to turn that population, its elite institutions, and diaspora into a densely connected system. (HT Archive)

My thesis is that India has largely solved the first problem of scientific power: creating a sufficiently large, prosperous and educated population. Its next challenge is to turn that population, its elite institutions, and its global diaspora into a densely connected system capable of repeatedly producing work at the world frontier.

I do not mean that India is ready to rival the US or, increasingly, China. A more realistic comparison is with the UK.

Modern science is downstream of prosperity. As a zeroth-order estimate, consider how many Indians have incomes above the British median at purchasing-power parity. The answer is plausibly around 20-30 million adults.

Britain itself has roughly the same number of adults above its median. Thus India already contains a prosperous population of roughly the scale that sustains British science. Over the next decade, that Indian population could approach 40-55 million.

Britain is a demanding benchmark: It still punches above its demographic weight scientifically. Yet India is already surprisingly close in broad measures of excellent science. In the Nature Index, Britain’s overall output is about twice India’s, but in physical sciences the ratio is about 1.4 to one and in applied sciences about 1.6. In chemistry, India actually exceeds Britain. The larger gap in biology and medicine suggests deficits in infrastructure rather than any general inability to do first-rate science.

Farther out on the scientific tail, Britain remains dramatically ahead in Nature and Science papers and major prizes. But prizes are lagging indicators: Today’s Nobels largely reward environments of decades ago. India’s contemporary performance in highly cited research is considerably closer to Britain’s.

Statistics for science done in India also understate the contribution of people produced by India. Many of India’s best scientists leave for graduate school and contribute to American, British and other systems. Britain, too, loses talent to the US. Changes in American immigration and visa policy may reduce this magnet; the long-run effects remain to be seen. Science benefits from mobility. The challenge is to turn brain drain into circulation and connectivity.

That suggests three priorities.

First, connect India’s scientific institutions much more densely, both to one another and to the world. Britain has a geographic advantage: Oxford, Cambridge, London, Birmingham, Warwick and Bristol inhabit what is effectively one scientific labour market. India’s IISc, TIFR, IITs and IISERs are scattered across continental distances. India can reduce effective distance through joint programmes, visiting appointments, shared postdocs and easy funding for scientific travel.

Internationally, Israel offers an instructive example — another small country whose science has benefited from a distinguished global diaspora. The US-Israel Binational Science Foundation helped turn deep scientific ties, catalysed by the Jewish presence in American science, into persistent working relationships between laboratories in the two countries.

India has its own accomplished scientific diaspora in the US and Britain. The lesson is not simply to persuade these scientists to return, but to make them durable participants through joint programmes, two- way movement of students and postdocs, and repeated visits.

Second, create room for institutional experimentation. If India’s scientific enterprise expands dramatically, it need not merely reproduce existing institutions. New institutes and new structures within old ones should be free to experiment with recruitment, evaluation, international appointments and private funding. The newly established Lodha Institutes, backed by substantial philanthropy, are potentially one such experiment.

LIGO-India offers another model. As part of a real-time international network of gravitational-wave observatories, it will be embedded in frontier science from its first day. It bids fair to produce future Nobel-class discoveries in which important work is actually done on Indian soil.

Finally, India should identify fields where it has unusual comparative advantages. Astrophysics and cosmology around LIGO are one. Genetics is another: India’s extraordinary genetic diversity means that a national resource on the scale and depth of the UK Biobank could transform global understanding of human genetics. Computer science and AI are a third, building on India’s deep software ecosystem and global technical diaspora.

For much of India’s first 80 years, the binding constraint on science was scarcity. That constraint has not disappeared, but the problem has changed. India now has the people, institutions and global connections to become a major scientific power.

The next level is to connect them — and create a system in which great science becomes routine.

Shivaji Sondhi (FRS) is Wykeham professor of physics at Oxford University and professor of physics, emeritus, at Princeton University. The views expressed are personal