This has resulted in an unprecedented level of competition for R&D grants so much so that application to grant ratio has declined to under 10% across several R&D funding agencies, the panel has observed in its report and recommended over 50 measures to overhaul India’s R&D landscape.
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The Niti Aayog’s ‘Ease of doing R&D’ report has red-flagged ‘inadequate’ to ‘skewed’ funding for R&D besides ‘cumbersome’ and time-consuming processes seriously bogging down India’s research landscape, including the already stressed manpower.
The report also points to gaps in the flagship Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) from duplication of efforts to ‘over concentration of funding’ in a select set of institutes, mainly IITs.
Seven categories of challenges have been identified– from R&D funding and utilisation to attracting and retaining quality human resources, fixing institutional structures and processes, technology development, translation and commercialisation, enabling access to knowledge and resources to boosting in state institutions and improving monitoring, evaluation, capacity building and policy administration in the area.
The report’s recommendations include the need to raise funding from 0.6% of GDP to 2% besides tax breaks, reduced GST slab of 5% for R&D and a six-month deadline for proposal processing and clearance.
Read more:NITI backs 5% GST slab for R&D procurement
ET takes a look at the some challenges and the reform path recommended.
FUND Qs
The panel points to the ‘skewed’ nature of funding — 80% of ANRF funding is going to the IIT system even though ANRF has a specific mandate for supporting R&D in state institutions — a goal far from being achieved. The report red-flagged how ANRF also does not have suitable representation from outside the IIT system.
There is also heavy duplication with multiple ministries and agencies supporting similar R&D activities.
So, in areas like Hydrogen Energy, Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage etc, both DST and CSIR are supporting R&D projects. Similarly, there are several areas where ANRF is duplicating the efforts of DST.
ANRF’s new Hub and Spoke model through the Partnerships for Accelerated Innovation and Research (PAIR) programme to promote research activities in state institutions reflects this with equipment and research infrastructure concentrated at hub institutions.
The Niti panel points to heavy delays in fund release — grants being released 3-6 months even after approvals besides the ‘frequent changes in fund distribution mechanism’ over the last few years, the complex TSA model and the ‘use it or lose it’ budgeting framework at the end of financial year that is causing discontinuity in R&D activities, non-payment of fellowships to research proposals for a few months and repeated efforts for reassignment.
Rigid R&D allocation and small procurements getting stuck add to pain points.
Solution: The panel has recommended increasing GERD from 0.6% to 2% of the GDP over next five years; attracting private sector investment through collaboration-based incentive framework, allowing higher tax deductions of up to 125% for CSR support, restoration of the 5% GST slab for R&D procurement which was available till June 2022 besides easing up procurement procedures, institutional overhead components and so on.
HUMAN TOUCH
The Global Innovation Index (GII) report 2025 shows the number of Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) researchers in India remains as low as 262 per million, compared to Switzerland (5,552), the UK (4,821), the USA (4,821) and China (1,585).
The overall post-doctoral fellowships support from all departments and agencies combined together is about 2,500 per year. The reasons: ‘Sub-optimal’ support system for R&D human resources.
Though there are now over 20,000+ PhD fellowships available per year through multiple departments and agencies, there are often delays in scholars receiving their fellowships — the first fellowship instalment itself takes about 4-5 months besides intermittent delays even later either due to fund reassignment delay with change in financial year or temporary unavailability of fund, the report notes.
Add to that the lack of autonomy that institutes face when they need to recruit new manpower, the delays in the process and the difficultly of retaining scholars post PhD amid poor financial incentives, inter-institutional mobility besides ‘unbalanced’ teaching & research load at Indian universities disallowing adequate time for the latter.
Solution: The panel has called for increasing post doctoral fellowships by 20% every year for the next few years besides creation of ‘Vigyan Nidhi’– streamlined funding architecture to boost manpower retention.